Retail giant Carrefour SA has adopted blockchain ledger technology to track and trace chicken, eggs and tomatoes as they travel from farms to stores, and will deploy it across all of its fresh product lines in coming years.

The French retailer said it will rely on blockchain technology developed by IBM, which is working with a number of retailers, logistics firms and growers to roll out systems to secure their global supply chains.

IBM Food Trust allows the industry to track and share information on how products are grown, processed and shipped. The technology cuts the time for checking the provenance of food from days or weeks to seconds, IBM said.

Blockchain, best known as the technology underlying cryptocurrency bitcoin, is a shared record of data kept by a network of individual computers rather than a single party.

Proponents say it has the power to transform industries from finance to real estate, but so far there have been few examples of its large-scale application.

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