Blockchain is about to get tested with America’s food exports.

The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has allocated more than a quarter million dollars to try out IBM’s blockchain technology to optimize the certification systems for food shipped across international borders. This entails verifying documents, sampling product and meeting other requirements – a process that must take into account standards in both the United States and the destination country.

IBM is building a proof-of-concept model as part of FSIS’s export modernization initiative. The goal is to see if blockchain can bring “increased immutability and visibility of critical documentation traversing across the supply chain,” an FSIS spokesperson told Yahoo! Finance. The contract runs through June.

Blockchain is a technology that uses encryption to build an unalterable record of transactions across a supply chain.