Insurtech giant ZhongAn plans to use facial recognition, blockchain to monitor chickens

ZhongAn Technology, the tech incubator of Chinese insurtech giant ZhongAn Online, is not satisfied with being the first in China to use blockchain technology to monitor the life journey of chickens in organic farming – it now plans to use facial recognition to better identify each bird during real-time monitoring.

The company, a unit of Hong Kong-listed ZhongAn Online Property & Casualty Insurance, is targeting China’s increasingly health-conscious urban consumers, who want to trace the origins of chickens labelled as organic or free-range, and even follow a bird’s life to know how it grew up on the farm.

“Each of our chickens wears an anklet since birth, which is an IoT [internet of things] device that connects wirelessly to our blockchain-based network and sends real-time data about the bird’s whereabouts, and how much exercise it gets every day, ” Chen Wei, chief executive officer for ZhongAn Tech, told the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.

“When you shop and see raw chicken [from us], you can simply check on your smartphone app to know its birthplace, what food it ate and how many steps it walked during its life.”

Blockchain is a distributed database that serves as a secure and unalterable ledger of activity, and

it is hard for anyone to tamper with data at any stage of the chicken farming process, said Chen.