AB InBev

AB InBev, the world's largest brewer with brands including Leffe, Stella Artois, and Budweiser, faced a critical supply chain visibility gap across its barley procurement network. As one of the largest barley buyers globally, the company maintained direct relationships with 60% of its farming base — but the remaining 40% of indirect suppliers operated with no real-time data integration. In food and beverage, where ingredient provenance directly affects regulatory compliance and brand trust, that blind spot carried meaningful risk. Without an immutable, shared data platform connecting every tier from farm to shelf, AB InBev could not verify sourcing claims upstream, respond to quality incidents quickly, or credibly communicate ingredient origins to increasingly transparency-conscious consumers.

AB InBev partnered with Fujitsu and blockchain specialist SettleMint to deploy a private, permissioned blockchain platform built for food supply chain traceability. The solution integrated directly with AB InBev's existing SAP ERP and third-party supply chain management systems, creating a unified data layer across all participants — barley farmers in northeast France, a malting cooperative and malthouse in Antwerp, the Leuven brewery, warehouses, and carriers. A structured four-week initiation phase mapped existing data flows before development began, enabling clean integration without disrupting live operations. Agile and DevOps methodologies kept the build iterative and auditable throughout. The consumer-facing layer was delivered as mobile-scannable QR codes printed on Leffe beer packs, allowing shoppers to trace their barley from field growth and harvest through malting to the finished product.

The pilot, launched in October 2020, equipped one million Leffe beer packs in France with traceability QR codes — the headline metric confirming the platform's readiness for broader rollout. Beyond the consumer-facing output, the project closed the visibility gap on AB InBev's previously opaque indirect supplier network, bringing farmers, cooperatives, breweries, warehouses, and carriers onto a single immutable ledger for the first time.

• 1 million Leffe beer packs equipped with traceability QR codes in the French pilot
• End-to-end coverage from northeast France barley farms through the Antwerp malthouse to the Leuven brewery
• Pilot positions AB InBev for its 2025 goal of having 100% of direct farmers skilled, connected, and financially empowered

• Blockchain addresses the specific F&B challenge that legacy ERP cannot: real-time visibility into indirect supplier tiers where no direct data relationship exists.
• A dedicated initiation phase to map existing data flows before build significantly reduces integration risk when connecting to SAP and third-party environments.
• Consumer-facing QR codes convert a back-office compliance tool into a brand engagement asset — ingredient transparency becomes a point-of-sale differentiator.
• Combining a domain-specific blockchain vendor (SettleMint) with an enterprise systems integrator (Fujitsu) compresses deployment timelines by separating platform expertise from SAP integration complexity.
• Piloting on one brand and one geography before scaling across a global portfolio limits exposure while generating proof of concept at statistically meaningful volume.