Walmart Tracks Lettuce With Blockchain. No, Really.

Remember when blockchain was going to revolutionize everything? Decentralize finance, eliminate middlemen, change the world? Yeah, about that.

Most enterprise blockchain projects died quietly. But there’s one use case that actually works: tracking stuff. Boring? Absolutely. Profitable? Ask Walmart.

They’ve been using blockchain to track leafy greens since 2018. Before you laugh, consider this: when romaine lettuce got contaminated with E. coli in 2017, it took Walmart seven days to trace the source. Seven days of pulling product from shelves, losses in the millions, people getting sick.

Now? Two seconds. I watched a demo. Scan the package, blockchain tells you exactly which farm, which field, what day it was harvested. If there’s contamination, they pull that specific batch in minutes, not weeks.

I asked their supply chain VP why blockchain instead of a regular database. “Trust,” he said. “Our suppliers don’t trust us to manage a central database fairly. We don’t trust them to report accurate data. Blockchain forces everyone to play straight because we all see the same ledger.”

That’s the only blockchain use case I’ve seen that actually makes sense. Not because it’s technically superior—a properly designed database could do the same thing. It’s the politics. When you have multiple organizations that need to share data but don’t fully trust each other, blockchain solves a social problem with code.

Maersk tried something similar for shipping containers. IBM partnered with them, huge PR splash, the whole nine yards. It mostly flopped. Why? They couldn’t get enough companies to adopt it. Network effects matter—a blockchain is worthless if only two companies use it.

The dirty secret of enterprise blockchain is that 90% of projects could be replaced by a shared database and a Slack channel. But companies spent millions on “blockchain pilots” because it looked good in press releases. Most of those are getting quietly shut down now.

What’s left are the practical ones. Supply chain tracking. Cross-border payment settlement. Document verification for shipping. Not sexy, but functional.

The revolution will not be decentralized. It’ll be incremental, boring, and track your lettuce.