In a nod to its open-first technology principle to help address the world’s most significant food challenges, Cargill is investing its own digital engineering to aid in the success and adoption of Hyperledger Grid. As the latest project in Hyperledger’s portfolio of open-source frameworks and tools, Hyperledger Grid was created to accelerate development of blockchain and other digital solutions for the global food and agricultural supply chains.

“Hyperledger Grid is another way to help make food and agricultural supply chains more inclusive, creating new markets for farmers and developing economies,” said Keith Narr, vice president of Cargill Digital Labs. “With our wide set of food and agricultural supply chain data, Cargill is leading the industry to work together and improve traceability, trade, food safety, nutrition, farmer livelihoods and more.”

Hyperledger Grid provides an ecosystem of reusable, open-source, digital tools that developers can work with to build products, prototypes and applications that address supply chain use cases, including traceability, food safety, trade settlement and more. Hyperledger Grid builds upon Hyperledger Sawtooth, a project originally contributed to The Linux Foundation by Intel and maintained by Cargill, Bitwise IO, Intel and others.

“Technology has the power to help us solve some of the greatest challenges facing the food and ag supply chains and also equips us to better serve our customers,” Narr said. “Everyone should have access to the best thinking and digital solutions available, and Hyperledger Grid is a key first step in bringing that vision to reality.”

Hyperledger Grid is receiving support from other companies that include Bitwise IO and Intel – companies that, like Cargill, see its advantages for food and agricultural supply chains.

"Hyperledger Grid is an incredible opportunity for supply chain participants to leverage the power of open-source software ‘up the stack,’” Bitwise IO president James Mitchell said. “For the first time, organizations building supply chain solutions will be able to collaborate on shared industry standard frameworks rather than relying on proprietary software or costly ‘from scratch’ development efforts. At Bitwise IO, we are thrilled to contribute our deep distributed ledger expertise as we partner with visionary organizations like Cargill on Hyperledger Grid.”