Major Food Safety Firm Neogen to Test a Use Case For Blockchain

U.S.-based food and animal safety Neogen Corporation has partnered with blockchain firm Ripe Technology for tracking food and animal sources.

The connection will allow Neogen to use the Ripe blockchain to track sources for products, as well as resolve issues such as recalls.

Neogen is hoping that the connection with blockchain technology will provide consumers with greater awareness of animal and food safety.

“There are countless potential benefits to adopting the technology. For example, the genomic profile of a dairy cow could be connected with the feed the animal eats, its medical history, barn environment, quantity and quality of the milk it produces, etc. Blockchain can serve to optimize the entire supply chains of many of the markets that Neogen serves,” John Adent, CEO of the company, was quoted as saying in an announcement.

The news comes as no surprise, as the nascent technology is already making inroads into a host of supply chain applications. For example, tech giant IBM has already offered a solution for companies seeking blockchain technology to manage supply chain decisions.

As a distributed ledger, the supply chain application of blockchain offers companies a start-to-finish immutable tracking record. As product origin questions continue to grow more important to consumers, such solutions, if they prove their effectiveness, might increase in popularity.

Neogen Corporation announced in September that revenues for the first quarter of its 2020 fiscal year, which ended August 31, were USD 101 million, compared to the previous year’s first quarter revenues of USD 99.6 million.