Food Tech Giant Bühler Reveals ‘Blockchain-Ready’ Tools to Combat Salmonella and E. Coli

Swiss food technology giant Bühler introduced two food safety products that can potentially integrate blockchain at the Microsoft booth at the Hannover Messe industrial event in Germany on April 1. The company reported the news in a press release published the same day.

The so-called “blockchain-ready” products presented by the company are a tool aiming to reduce microbial contamination in dry goods, dubbed Laatu, and Tubex Pro, a scale system that self-optimizes and produces a constant flow of production data. Both solutions are connected to the Bühler Insights Internet of Things service, hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

The company claims that Laatu is able to destroy over 99.999 percent of salmonella while maintaining the quality nutritional value of food by exposing dry foods to low-energy electrons. The system is also reportedly effective on E. Coli, spores and the exposure only lasts milliseconds. As the press release notes, “with a potential link to blockchain, it [Laatu] is capable of providing an accurate and secure audit trail for food producers and all players in the supply-chain.”

Per the release, Tubex Pro self-optimizes its measuring algorithm and steams data to the Bühler Insights platform in real-time. According to the company, the data generated by both the systems can be linked to a blockchain to provide a transparent and secure audit trail for everyone involved in the supply chain.

Nicolas Meneses, Laatu Project Manager at Bühler, noted that data stored on blockchain would not only allow for the verification that the food has been decontaminated within company’s system:

“Using blockchain you can see if a food ingredient has been properly processed in seconds rather than days – and with a high degree of certainty. You can then quickly take action. This helps reduce the number of people exposed to potentially unsafe food and also to cut food waste as the specific batch can be traced.”

Bühler Group was founded in 1860 and is a multinational corporation, operating in 140 countries. The firm saw an annual revenue of about 3.3 billion Swiss francs ($3.3 billion) in 2018.

In this week’s press release, the company claims that its machines currently process 70 percent of the world’s chocolate, 65 percent of the world’s grain products and 30 percent of global rice and pulses.

As Cointelegraph reported last week, the Coffee Board of India has launched a pilot blockchain-based e-marketplace in order to integrate coffee farmers with markets.

Also during last week, news broke that premium scotch whiskey brand Ailsa Bay is reportedly about to release what it believes to be the world’s first scotch whiskey tracked with a blockchain-based system.