China's ZhongAn Unveils Blockchain Tech for Food Supply Chain

One day you may be able to check where your chicken was bred, raised, processed and examined.

That's because China's ZhongAn Technology announced this week a blockchain-based system that aims to track the whole process of the chicken farming, according to Chinese media outlets Leiphone and Jiemian.

Formed last November

as a technology division under China's first web-only insurer ZhongAn, ZhongAn Technology said the blockchain application will give each chicken an identity that can trace and record the information of its birth, the farms on which it was raised and the processing factories and logistic suppliers it reaches on its way to market.

The project is also a partnership with Wopu, an Internet of Things company based in Hangzhou that provides physical devices attached to the chicken and uses mobile applications to check each transaction recorded on the blockchain.

With the news, ZhongAn is rolling out one of the first blockchain use cases in the country's agricultural industry, though one that follows on a larger trend.

Food safety

has been haunting the country's customers over the last a dozen years, a crisis popularized by heightened media coverage.

For example, one of the more major recent issues was reported in 2014 when a subsidiary of OSI Group in Shanghai was exposed for having supplied expired chicken meat to KFC and McDonalds in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macau.

Food image via Shutterstock