China’s Shandong Province partners with IBM to improve pork safety

By eGov Innovation Editors | Dec 20, 2011

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IBM and Shandong Commercial Group Co. Ltd. (Lushang Group) have built a system that will help ensure the safety of pork products in the Shandong Province while improving the efficiency of the food supply chain in the region.  

“When fully deployed, this system will give consumers in the Shandong Province confidence in the pork products they serve to their families,” said Wang Guo Li, director, National Agricultural Research Center for Modern Logistics Engineering. As an agricultural powerhouse within China, our province is committed to improving food safety and this system marks a significant step toward that goal.”

China is the world's largest consumer of pork and it also produces more pigs than the next 43 pork-producing countries combined. In 2006, a fatal outbreak of porcine blue-ear disease killed millions of Chinese pigs. These losses represented a tiny portion of the country’s total herd of more than 660 million, but led to soaring pork prices. 

To limit the impact of porcine diseases and prevent tainted pork from being sold to consumers, Shandong Provincial Municipality asked Lushang Group, one of China’s top 10 retail companies, and its affiliate the research body –- the National Engineering Research Center for Agricultural Products Logistics -- to devise a system that would improve accountability and safety in the region’s pork industry.

In 2010, Lushang Group began working with IBM to create the new system, which is being tested by six selected slaughterhouses, six warehouses and about 100 Inzone hypermarkets and supermarkets across the Shandong province. When fully deployed in 2013, the system will allow Lushang Group to monitor and trace the movement of meat across all phases of the supply chain, including farms, processing plants, trucks and supermarkets. 

Using IBM WebSphere software running on IBM System x Servers, experts from IBM China Development Lab and China’s National Engineering Research Center for Agricultural Products Logistics have also created a pork monitoring and tracking system that can extract and store actionable business information from the millions of interconnected sensors that make up the “Internet of Things.”

The system brings accountability and efficiency to every stage of the pork production process, including production, distribution and retailing.

“Based on our experiences in building food and pharmaceutical tracking systems in other countries, IBM has helped to create a system that traces pork through the entire supply chain from pig farms all the way to supermarkets,” said Matt Wang, Vice President, IBM China Development Lab. “Using this system, Shandong Province’s pork products will be safer and thus, more desirable to consumers. Governments and pork producers in other countries should take note of what Lushang Group is doing."