Retail Giant Target Is Quietly Working on a Blockchain for Supply Chains

Retail giant Target has quietly entered the blockchain space.

More recently it pledged to support the Hyperledger Grid project, a supply chain framework that earlier saw participation from food giant Cargill, one of Target's suppliers, together with tech giant Intel and blockchain startup Bitwise.io.

To boost its distributed ledger technology-related work, Target is now looking for a blockchain engineer and systems developer, according to the company's career page.

The ConsenSource project, which Target recently open-sourced, was primarily focused on the certification of suppliers for the company's own paper manufacturing.

"Many companies - including Target - see the most potential for enterprise blockchain initiatives as open source. Open-source projects require all participating parties to define the governance model collectively from the outset, so companies then can focus their time working on blockchain-based solutions that will lead to greater speed, transparency and cost savings."

Until now, Target has largely flown under the radar with its blockchain initiatives.

In December 2018, CoinDesk learned from a source within Hyperledger that Target - the eighth-largest retailer in the U.S. - had been working on a supply chain product under the umbrella of the open-source Hyperledger consortium.

The source, who did not want to be identified, said Target would join the Sawtooth Supply Chain project, which is developing a distributed application to track the provenance of food and other assets using the Sawtooth implementation of Hyperledger.

In its last annual report to shareholders, Target said it is investing in supply chain improvements.

The company is "In the process of a broad migration of many mainframe-based systems and middleware products to a modern platform, including systems supporting inventory and supply chain-related transactions," the company said, without mentioning blockchain or DLT. Update: This article was updated with a comment from Hyperledger clarifying Target's relationship to the consortium.