THE LIFE STORY OF YOUR SUPERMARKET CHICKEN: FOOD TRACKING GOES HIGH-TECH

From poultry monitors to berry-tracking blockchains, the food industry is adopting technology to meet our growing demand for information about what we eat. Supply-chain expert Robyn Metcalfe investigates.

Restaurant servers could one day tell you how the chicken on their menu lived and also how it fits with your preferences and health data. 

Imagine reviewing official papers describing a chicken's origin, diet, and living conditions when dining in a restaurant... Wouldn't that be cool to learn? Well soon we could all experience this using GoGo chicken, a poultry monitoring technology developed by ZhongAn Technology which is a subsidiary of the Chinese online insurer ZhongAn Online.

The way this works is, each chicken wears a tracking device on its food which automatically uploads its real-time movements through the supply-chain to a blockchain. These sensors help monitor temperature, humidity, and other aspects of the chicken's environment while algorithms evaluate the bird's health using video analysis. 

GoGo chicken is designed to provide consumers with access to a wealth of information for each chicken via smartphone app. GoGo chicken is made to prevent food-safety and food-fraud issues, lowering risk and liability for the agricultural industry. They are working on this project to offer consumers, producers, and regulators significant information such as where their food is at every step. 

ZhongAn is testing the technology and plans to roll it out to hundreds of Chinese farms by 2020 so everyone should expect to start seeing this technology in the market very soon. The company has invested heavily and is very confident about this project and believes society will be happy to experience it. 

I believe this new technology applies to marketing because is a great way of targeting consumers to buy more of what they already buy and eat by teaching them the product's origin and all its history. 

The food industry is investing in technology—from internet-connected sensors to geolocation data and blockchain—that will help producers, shippers, regulators and consumers know where our food is at every step.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-life-story-of-your-supermarket-chicken-food-tracking-goes-high-tech-11550761202?mod=foesummaries