Enhancing Food Quality and Transparency in Agri-Food Supply Chains via IoT Sensing and Blockchain Traceability

Abstract

Agri-food supply chains face issues of fragmented data, insufficient traceability, and poor tracking of environmental parameters regarding maintaining quality control, transparency, and sustaining consumer trust. This study integrates IoT and blockchain technologies to fill those gaps in food quality assessment and traceability. To facilitate greater transparency within the system, captured data undergoes storage on a decentralized blockchain network which ensures immutable security while guaranteeing audit-ready records for all transactions within their infrastructure. Proof of stake smart contracts automatically verify set conditions bound to quality checks then issue notification alerts when predetermined values are breached triggering automated alerts. In addition to these smart contracts, this research builds systems that use blockchains as databases for tracing products enabling all participants to monitor the position and parameter quality of items at every node within the network. As with any system, the proposed one must undergo validation in terms of performance evaluation on key metrics which include latency, scalability, accuracy of quality prediction, data integrity and trust among stakeholders. The results obtained experimentally show that there is an increase in visibility as well as the possibility to trace in IoT and blockchain aided decision support systems. Further work will aim to expand the model towards supporting interoperability for worldwide supply chains as well as integrating AI-driven predictive analytics for preemptive management of food quality.