**4.3 Pilot initiatives**

Since late 2016, retail giants Walmart and IBM worked together for a pilot project to develop a blockchain-based system for tracking produce in the U.S. and pork in China. The project traced each product and collected its associated data, including origin farm/factory, storage temperature, and serial number. With this technology, tracking reports for each product were produced within minutes and the speed and accuracy of identifying and recalling contaminated food products were significantly improved [59]. On May 31, 2017, Walmart released the results of this pilot project and reported that blockchain technology helped them trace the origin of Chinese pork and U.S. mangoes in 2.2 seconds, which would normally take as long as several weeks in a traditional supply chain platform [60].

Intel conducted a public demo to explore the implementation of blockchain technology for tracking seafood in the supply chain. They aimed to create a network that assists multiple parties with food storage condition (i.e., temperature) control and with tracking food from sea to table. Several public records of this project are available on the Traceability Blockchain website [61]. These records detail how to use blockchain technology to collect seafood product data (i.e., locations, timestamps, owners, temperatures, etc.) from fishermen, transports, and restaurants within the entire supply chain network. This seafood blockchain can foster more trust between customers and sellers, improve and expedite the food safety network, and enhance consumer experiences.

In 2018, el Maouchi introduced TRADE, a fully transparent and decentralized traceability system for the supply chain that leverages blockchain technology [17]. It is a single system in which multiple participants can transfer and track products flowing through the supply chain. Additionally, it enables customers and other parties in the system to view and verify product data. Experiments show that each actor on the TRADE system can create about 351 and validate 437 transactions per second.

#### *Computer Security Threats*

Since August 2018, IBM and Maersk (the world's largest shipping company) have teamed up to create TradeLens, a blockchain-based system for the global supply chain. TradeLens aims to create a platform for multiple trading parties to securely share databases containing massive amounts of transactional information, and to build a more collaborative environment for global trading. This system is a powerful tool for establishing a single and consistent shared status of each transaction in near real-time while maintaining stakeholder confidentiality. Reports show that TradeLens significantly reduced delays caused by documentation errors and reduced the transit time associated with shipping packaging materials to manufactures in the U.S. up to 40% [62].
