China’s Long Food Chain Plugs In

HONG KONG — The smartphone tells the story of a kiwi fruit in China.

With a quick scan of a code, shoppers can look up the fruit’s complete thousand-mile journey from a vine in a lush valley along the upper Yangtze River to a bin in a Beijing supermarket. The smartphone feature, which also details soil and water tests from the farm, is intended to ensure that the kiwi has not been contaminated anywhere along the way.

“I have scanned some electronic products before, but never any food,” said Xu Guillin, who recently tested the tracking function at the supermarket while shopping with her 3-year-old grandson. “We pay lots of attention to food safety. Most families with young kids would.”

Controlling China’s sprawling food supply chain has proved a frustrating endeavor. Government regulators and state-owned agriculture companies have tried to tackle the problem in a number of ways — increasing factory inspections, conducting mass laboratory tests, enhancing enforcement procedures, even with prosecutions and executions — but food safety scandals still emerge too often.



Chinese technology companies believe they can do it better. From the farm to the table, the country’s biggest players are looking to upgrade archaic systems with robust data collection, smartphone apps, online marketplaces and fancy gadgetry.

The founder of the computer maker Lenovo started Joyvio, the agricultural company that tracks kiwis and other fruit from planting to delivery. The Internet giant Alibaba directly connects consumers with farmers via an online produce-delivery service. A gaming entrepreneur is running a pig farm on the side. And Baidu, the country’s leading search engine, is developing a “smart” chopstick that tests whether food is contaminated.

“In the food production and agriculture industry, transparency is fundamental,” said Chen Shaopeng, chief executive of Joyvio. “But in China this is not the case.”

While technology companies may not have the scandal-tainted past of the traditional food industry, they will still have to earn customers’ trust. A shopper at another Beijing supermarket, BHG Market Place, tested the trackable kiwi and was intrigued, although not enough to buy it.

“This looks impressive. But the thing is, I don’t really trust any certificate,” said Ms. Jiang, who declined to give her full name, looking closely at a three-page report on the fruit. “We all know that certificates can be faked.”

The size of the problem alone is daunting. With more than a billion mouths to feed, China has one of the world’s most complex food chains. At almost every link, there have been problems.

In one of the country’s biggest food scares, in 2008 dairy producers sold milk formula laced with melamine, which put 300,000 babies in the hospital and killed six. Last year, a supplier to McDonald’s and KFC was caught putting rotten and expired meat into products. Penny-pinching chefs cook with waste oil from fryers and sewers, a toxic ingredient known as gutter oil that generally goes unnoticed until diners get sick.

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