Coca-Cola Supply Co. To Expand Blockchain Efforts After Successful Trial

Coca-Cola’s supply chain operations are run by an IT firm called Coke One North America (CONA), and the company recently had such a successful run with blockchain software provider SAP that it’s going to expand the program from two to 70 manufacturers, according to reports.

Those manufacturers deliver about 160,000 bottles a day. The purpose of the blockchain push was to help improve distribution and allow the manufacturers access to others’ orders and specifications.

That way, if there’s a stock shortage in one place, there are easy ways to fix the problem.

“There are a number of transactions that are cross-companies and multi-party that are inefficient, they go through intermediaries, they are very slow,” senior manager at Coke One North America Andrei Semenov said. “And we felt that we could improve this and save some money.”

As a result of the program, more bottles were sent out and more efficiency was attained. CONA wants to work with Walmart and Target next.

“What we achieved here with blockchain is creating a document flow across the supply chain,” said Torsten Zube, head of SAP’s Innovation Center Network.

PepsiCo also recently started trying out blockchain, and it said that efficiency was raised 28 percent.

In other blockchain news, The CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, is investing in CoinList, a company that helps startups raise capital through cryptocurrency sales.

Dorsey, who has been an advocate of bitcoin for a long time, is one of many investors in the 2-year-old company’s $10 million funding round.

The funding round was led by Polychain Capital.

Dorsey, who is also the CEO of payments company Square, has bitcoin of his own and often shares his positive opinion of the cryptocurrency. This is the first time Dorsey has invested in CoinList. Square recently said that it was going to introduce a new service called Square Crypto.

CoinList, which is based in San Francisco, jumped to popularity in 2017 during the cryptocurrency boom in initial coin offerings (ICOs), where companies would raise money in exchange for tokens. The market for ICOs blew up and then bombed with bitcoin’s roller coaster ride in value.