Blockchain Technology to Support Agri-Food Supply Chains: A Comprehensive Review

Abstract

Blockchain technology is a distributed ledger that guarantees the immutability of data and asset tracking. Its characteristics can result in an improvement to traditional agri-food Supply Chains. Blockchain-based traceability systems let producers improve their visibility and consumers trust the products they buy and where they come from. Actual literature lacks an exhaustive analysis of the benefits and drawbacks of Blockchain applied to the agri-food domain. This paper aims to overcome this issue: to understand the state-of-the-art related to the application of Blockchain in the agri-food sector, we screened 183 papers and performed a literature review answering six Research Questions. The work takes into consideration the advantages and disadvantages of implementing such paradigm, with an analysis on the role of industries. The main findings are related to research directions: they regard the lack of training both for industries and stakeholders, the involvement of additional technologies (i.e., Big Data, Edge Computing), and the absence of supporting tools for developers.