Quito, Ecuador, March 2 -- El Ordeño today announces a new solution to support the dairy industry in Ecuador, a country which produces 5 million liters of milk annually. The company has joined IBM Food Trust, a global ecosystem for the food industry, to provide responsibility and transparency to its customers.

El Ordeño will use the blockchain-based technology to monitor its TRU milk products, which have been relaunched with new packaging featuring a QR code. By scanning the label with a mobile device, consumers can now access information about the path that their TRU milk has traveled, including information about the producer as well as the quality centers, cold chains and distribution centers the milk traveled through, all the way to the table.

"We are constantly transforming the way we do business to ensure the best possible quality for all our products," said Guilherme Franklin, El Ordeño COO. "Blockchain technology provides the transparency we need to show that our products comply with quality processes and steps before they reach Ecuadorians’ table. Global milk production is expected to reach 981 million tons by 2028, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO); and production will increase 1.7% annually.”

The solution will also allow supply chain partners to securely and selectively connect ecosystem data with transparency. Most importantly, final consumers will have information to trace the origin and condition of the milk products they buy and eat, and producers will minimize waste and fraud.

"Consumers are increasingly aware of how important it is to know the origin and traceability of the products they consume," says Martín Hagelstrom, IBM Blockchain Leader for IBM Latin America. “IBM Food Trust provides El Ordeño with a single, immutable and transparent source of information about how their milk products are distributed throughout the country. Most importantly, Food Trust allows consumers to access this information in real time when they buy the products and to make purchase decisions based on the data.”

El Ordeño has a plan to scale the solution not only to its milk portfolio, but to all its dairy products that arrive daily at Ecuadorian tables. You can read more about Food Trust here.

About El Ordeño
El Ordeño evolves with commitment and shared value. The Ecuadorian company specialized in the production, innovation and marketing of sustainable foods has a pillar in its management based on innovation, which allows it to apply new and better mechanisms to adapt to the needs of a changing and accelerated environment; articulating tools that enhance integral development, boost competitiveness and efficiency in each process it executes. The company thus understands the integration of new technologies, research, human capital and knowledge, as key pieces for its path towards a 4.0 industry.

About IBM Blockchain
IBM is recognized as the leading enterprise blockchain provider. The company's research, technical and business experts have broken barriers in transaction processing speeds, developed the most advanced cryptography to secure transactions, and are contributing millions of lines of open source code to advance blockchain for businesses. IBM is the leader in open-source blockchain solutions built for the enterprise. Since 2016, IBM has worked with hundreds of clients across financial services, supply chain, government, retail, digital rights management and healthcare to implement blockchain applications, and operates a number of networks running live and in production. The cloud-based IBM Blockchain Platform delivers the end-to-end capabilities that clients need to quickly activate and successfully develop, operate, govern and secure their own business networks. IBM is an early member of Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies. For more information about IBM Blockchain, visit https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/ or follow us on Twitter at @ibmblockchain.