Somdip Dey, Suman Saha, A.R. Singh, Klaus D. McDonald-Maier
Food safety is an important issue in today’s world. Traditional agri-food production system doesn’t offer easy traceability of the produce at any point of the supply chain, and hence, during a food-borne outbreak, it is very difficult to sift through food production data to track produce and origin of the outbreak. In recent years, blockchain based food production system has resolved this challenge, however, none of the proposed methodologies makes the food production data easily accessible, traceable and verifiable by consumers or producers using mobile/edge devices. In this paper, we propose FoodSQRBlock (Food Safety Quick Response Block), a blockchain technology based framework, which digitizes the food production information, and makes it easily accessible, traceable and verifiable by the consumers and producers by using QR codes. We also propose a large scale integration of FoodSQRBlock in the cloud to show the feasibility and scalability of the framework, and experimental evaluation to prove that.
Food holds a major role in human beings’ lives and in human societies in general across the planet. The food and agriculture sector is considered to be a major employer at a worldwide level. The large number and heterogeneity of the stakeholders involved from different sectors, such as farmers, distributers, retailers, consumers, etc., renders the agricultural supply chain management as one of the most complex and challenging tasks. It is the same vast complexity of the agriproducts supply chain that limits the development of global and efficient transparency and traceability solutions. The present paper provides an overview of the application of blockchain technologies for enabling traceability in the agri-food domain. Initially, the paper presents definitions, levels of adoption, tools and advantages of traceability, accompanied with a brief overview of the functionality and advantages of blockchain technology. It then conducts an extensive literature review on the integration of blockchain into traceability systems. It proceeds with discussing relevant existing commercial applications, highlighting the relevant challenges and future prospects of the application of blockchain technologies in the agri-food supply chain.
Abstract This paper reviewed the existing and potential blockchain applications of this technology, which are to trade the agricultural wastes including animal wastes, energy, and byproducts among the farmers and entrepreneurs to generate wealth; to manage the animal product supply chains such as dairy products, beef, and chicken to enhance their safety and traceability; and to distribute the funds to refugees and migrants, displaced due to emergencies, to buy various farming inputs including feed. A blockchain is a distributed database of records in the form of encrypted “blocks” (smaller datasets), or a public ledger of all transactions or digital events that have been executed and shared among participating parties and can be verified at any time in the future. The attributes such as integrity, immutability collaboration, organization, identification, credibility, and transparency of blockchain technology make it ideal for a number of applications in animal production and animal health sectors. Some potential applications of the blockchain technology in the livestock sector, not limited to the ones stated here, are to effectively manage various input supply chains, such as animal feed, de-wormers, medicines, and vaccines, among others; integration of feed composition and environmental footprint databases; and sustainability and technology outreach platforms. Current challenges toward increased application of the blockchain technology are also presented. These topics would serve as the starting points for future applications of the blockchain technology in animal farming.
Abstract Food industry is unique from the point of view of Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) which is a supply chain management initiative specific to the food industry and reflects organizations’ efforts to achieve quick response to reaching to market and ultimately consumer using Electronic Data Interchange, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification and bar codes. This paper would focus on looking at pros and cons of evaluating traditional traceability (is an important link in protecting public health since it allows health agencies to more quickly and accurately identify the source of contaminated food, fruit or vegetables believed to be the cause of an outbreak of foodborne illness, remove them from the marketplace, and communicate to the supply chain) matrix versus newly introduced disruptive technology called blockchain. This report outlines various components of traceability and its relation to other parts and methodologies in ensuring food product authenticity the paper further outlines detailing of blockchain technology its various types, implementation with examples and application in food industry. The concluding part of paper compares traditional vs. blockchain methods in regard to cost benefit analysis and implementation perspective of blockchain. The paper through reasoning and arguments justifies that how blockchain bases systems of food traceability are more suitable from speed, confidentiality and ease of implementation perspective as compared to traditional electronic traceability and current systems. From limitation perspective this paper highlights how lack of interoperability is currently the biggest one obstacle preventing system-wide, farm-to-fork food product traceability.
Supply chain traceability is one of the most important problems faced by all organizations globally. Tracking any commodity is a tedious job and requires a lot of manual attention. The existing system uses a centralised database system to track a commodity. Blockchain is a decentralised, immutable ledger managed by a cluster of computers. The very nature of blockchain makes it suitable technology for traceability in a supply chain. Blockchain creates immutable records. Once a transaction is stored in the blockchain, it is impossible to tamper it illegally. This immutability of blockchain builds trust among the participants that conduct business in a lack of trust environment. Using consensus protocols, blockchain builds trust between the various participants. Blockchain provides traceability since immutable records are added in blockchain; it is easy to track the source of the product. This paper illustrates the Application of Blockchain in Agri-Food Supply Chain. It unfolds how blockchain technology can be integrated to an Agri Supply Chain and improves the traceability. This integration enables companies to quickly track unsafe products back to their source and see where else they have been distributed. This integration can result to prevent illness and save lives, as well as reduce the cost of product recalls.
As the population structure changes due to lower fertility rates and rapid aging, the blood supply available for blood transfusion decreases and demand increases. In most countries, blood management information systems, led by national institutions, operate centrally. However, existing centralized blood management systems have limitations in that they lack detailed blood information and, moreover, information is not reflected in real time. To solve this problem, this paper presents an innovative blood cold chain system based on blockchain technology. The proposed system aims to increase information visibility by recording the overall information on the blood supply and providing detailed blood information such as blood consumption and disposal to the distributed ledger. In addition, this paper proposes direct blood transactions between medical institutions in cases of emergency. Currently, blockchain technologies are being actively employed in the supply chain management and medical fields in addition to financial systems. Particularly, private blockchain techniques with limited participants are relatively fast and reliable, making them suitable for B2B (Business-to-Business) transactions. Therefore, the proposed system is based on the architecture of Hyperledger Fabric, a private blockchain technology implemented by the Hyperledger Composer tool. Information in the proposed blood cold chain system cannot be forged or tampered with, and information recorded and shared in real time is kept transparent. In addition, allowing for B2B blood transaction in special circumstances will minimize the blood supply time and enable patients to be transfused quickly. Moreover, the surplus blood of medical institutions will be used to increase the usage rate relative to the supply amount.
The BeefLedger Export Smart Contracts project is a collaborative research study between BeefLedger Ltd and QUT co-funded by the Food Agility CRC. This project exists to deliver economic value to those involved in the production, export and consumption of Australian beef to China through: (1) reduced information asymmetry; (2) streamlined compliance processes, and; (3) developing and accessing new data-driven value drivers, through the deployment of decentralised ledger technologies and associated governance systems. This report presents early insights from a survey deployed to Chinese consumers in Nov/Dec 2019 exploring attitudes and preferences about blockchain-credentialed beef exports to China. Our results show that most local and foreign consumers were willing to pay more than the reference price for a BeefLedger branded Australian cut and packed Sirloin steak at the same weight. Although considered superior over Chinese processed Australian beef products, the Chinese market were sceptical that the beef they buy was really from Australia, expressing low trust in Australian label and traceability information. Despite lower trust, most survey respondents were willing to pay more for traceability supported Australian beef, potentially because including this information provided an additional sense of safety. Therefore, traceability information should be provided to consumers, as it can add a competitive advantage over products without traceability.
The globalization of the food supply chain industry has significantly emerged today. Due to this, farm-to-fork food safety and quality certification have become very important. Increasing threats to food security and contamination have led to the enormous need for a revolutionary traceability system, an important mechanism for quality control that ensures sufficient food supply chain product safety. In this work, we proposed a blockchain-based solution that removes the need for a secure centralized structure, intermediaries, and exchanges of information, optimizes performance, and complies with a strong level of safety and integrity. Our approach completely relies on the use of smart contracts to monitor and manage all communications and transactions within the supply chain network among all of the stakeholders. Our approach verifies all of the transactions, which are recorded and stored in a centralized interplanetary file system database. It allows a secure and cost-effective supply chain system for the stakeholders. Thus, our proposed model gives a transparent, accurate, and traceable supply chain system. The proposed solution shows a throughput of 161 transactions per second with a convergence time of 4.82 s, and was found effective in the traceability of the agricultural products.
Objective: This paper explores the use of blockchain technology in agriculture and agricultural products.Research Design & Methods: The article is based on a critical analysis of the literature with a view to understanding the current state of use of blockchain technology in agriculture. It was assumed that blockchain technology is used in the agricultural sector to promote food security, prevent food fraud and verify the origin and authenticity of agricultural products and agricultural inputs.Findings: Blockchain technology improves traceability and transparency, allowing parties within the agricultural value chain to identify faulty or suboptimal processes as well as bad actors. This ensures that ideal conditions are pursued from farm to market. The ability to trace the origin of food products is essential when food safety breaks down. The early identification of the origin of contamination will enable food companies to swing into action quickly to prevent illness and thus save lives. Such a timely response will also help limit food wastage and will save money by containing financial fallout.Implications / Recommendations: Blockchain technology has strong potential for success within the agricultural sector. It can be used to ensure food safety by enabling the source of agricultural products, as well as the source of their potential contamination, to be traced, and the authenticity of farming inputs to be verified. Blockchain can also be employed in the process of disbursing subsidies to farmers to ensure that they benefit from subsidy programmes. Finally, blockchain technology will offer farmers better prices and better payment methods and solve challenges in land title sales and purchase registration.Contribution: Blockchain is a new technology to the agricultural sector, and enormous challenges remain. There is still no established system to regulate blockchain transactions. Nevertheless, the application of blockchain in agriculture holds promising rewards.
Zhihao Hao, Dianhui Mao, Bob Zhang, Min Zuo · 5 authors
Current food traceability systems have a number of problems, such as data being easily tampered with and a lack of effective methods to intuitively analyze the causes of risks. Therefore, a novel method has been proposed that combines blockchain technology with visualization technology, which uses Hyperledger to build an information storage platform. Features such as distribution and tamper-resistance can guarantee the authenticity and validity of data. A data structure model is designed to implement the data storage of the blockchain. The food safety risks of unqualified detection data can be quantitatively analyzed, and a food safety risk assessment model is established according to failure rate and qualification deviation. Risk analysis used visual techniques, such as heat maps, to show the areas where unqualified products appeared, with a migration map and a force-directed graph used to trace these products. Moreover, the food sampling data were used as the experimental data set to test the validity of the method. Instead of difficult-to-understand and highly specialized food data sets, such as elements in food, food sampling data for the entire year of 2016 was used to analyze the risks of food incidents. A case study using aquatic products as an example was explored, where the results showed the risks intuitively. Furthermore, by analyzing the reasons and traceability processes effectively, it can be proven that the proposed method provides a basis to formulate a regulatory strategy for regions with risks.
Jiang Duan, Chen Zhang, Yu Gong, Steve Brown · 5 authors
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one out of 10 people get sick from eating contaminated food. Complex food production process and globalization make food supply chain more delicate. Many technologies have been investigated in recent years to address food insecurity and achieve efficiency in dealing with food recalls. One of the most promising technologies is Blockchain, which has already been used successfully in financial aspects, such as bitcoin, and it is attracting interests from food supply chain organizations. As blockchain has characteristics, such as decentralization, security, immutability, smart contract, it is therefore expected to improve sustainable food supply chain management and food traceability. This paper applies a content-analysis based literature review in blockchain adoption within food supply chain. We propose four benefits. Blockchain can help to improve food traceability, information transparency, and recall efficiency; it can also be combined with Internet of things (IoT) to achieve better efficiency. We also propose five potential challenges, including lack of deeper understanding of blockchain, technology difficulties, raw data manipulation, difficulties of getting all stakeholders on board, and the deficiency of regulations.
With the increase in the complexity of the dairy supply chain system, consumers know very less about the products produced or processed by producer or processor. Such information asymmetry present in the dairy industry has serious concern over human health, environmental sustainability, and welfare issues. In this context, we require the effective dairy supply chain system that not only fulfils the information requirement of the consumers but also increase the trust of the consumer on the dairy product they are consuming. The paper tries to present the application of Blockchain technology in the dairy sector. It focuses on the application of the Blockchain technology on improving the dairy supply chain system. This paper presents how this technology can be used in the dairy supply chain system and outlines the potential benefit of it to the different stakeholders and the whole dairy industry as a whole. This is a review article based on the secondary data and information that are obtained from various published articles.
Giorgio Alessandro Motta, Bedir Teki̇nerdoğan, Ioannis N. Athanasiadis
This study aims to investigate the application potential of blockchain technology in the agri-food industry, by following a case study approach focused on the early adopter companies. As the topic is emerging, there are not enough academic papers available to warrant a systematic literature review. To confirm this hypothesis and to inform to better understand guide this research, we first conducted a pre-literature review. Based on its outcomes, we formulated three research questions, and developed a protocol to identify case studies, and subsequently analyzed them to answer our questions. We identified and studied six case studies, in which blockchain has been used to address issues of trust and transparency, and to facilitate information sharing among agrifood chain stakeholders. While blockchain adoption is still in its infancy, governance issues are important, as broader partnerships are required for successful, sustainable applications.
Hang Xiong, Tobias Dalhaus, Puqing Wang, Jiajin Huang
The blockchain is a ledger of accounts and transactions that are written and stored by all participants. It promises a reliable source of truth about the state of farms, inventories and contracts in agriculture, where the collection of such information is often incredibly costly. The blockchain technology can track the provenance of food and thus helps create trustworthy food supply chains and build trust between producers and consumers. As a trusted way of storing data, it facilitates the use of data-driven technologies to make farming smarter. In addition, jointly used with smart contracts, it allows timely payments between stakeholders that can be triggered by data changes appearing in the blockchain This article examines the applications of blockchain technology in food supply chains, agricultural insurance, smart farming, transactions of agricultural products for both theoretical and practical perspectives. We also discuss the challenges of recording transactions made by smallholder farmers and creating the ecosystem for utilizing the blockchain technology in the food and agriculture sector.
Jedsada tipmontian, Jaime Castellanos Alcover, M. Rajmohan
Today’s food supply chain is incredibly complex and imposes enormous challenges across the Globe. Products are transported through multimodal transportation internationally, comprising of combination of ship, rail, truck and flight modes etc. The supply chain under multistage network poses more quality related issues. Hence, blockchain technology helps to enhance food safety and quality in the logistics process. This, when coupled with the existing traceability system can create more agile value chain and closer customer relationship across regions. Though, Thailand is a leading food exporter, it lacks in implementation of blockchain technology. The objective of this study is to analyse the impact of blockchain technology adoption for safe food supply chain management through System Dynamics (SD) approach from management perspectives in Thailand. The preliminary survey and discussion were carried out with the participants from food expert firms, and causal loop diagrams and stock and flow diagrams were developed and validated. The trade-off, challenges and opportunities of applying block chain technology on the global food value supply chain has been discussed throughout the system dynamics model. The major contribution of this work is in providing insight into some of the main dimensions of block chain technology and its implications for global food value chain performance improvements.
Abstract Agriculture 4.0 is the era of integrating intelligent technologies in agriculture. Problems such as low informatization, food safety, high management cost and imbalance between supply and demand in agriculture have greatly hindered the development of agriculture. The various properties of blockchain technology can make up for the lack of agricultural mechanism, and the fusion of the two is a hot issue in the application of blockchain. Blockchain technology has already had some application cases in the field of agriculture. Based on the research status of Chinese and foreign scholars in this field, this paper firstly introduces the basic overview of blockchain. Then, with agricultural supply chain and agricultural product traceability as the core, it describes the application of blockchain technology in the agricultural field, and further explores solutions to different application problems. Finally, combined with the practical application of “agriculture + blockchain”, relevant Suggestions are proposed to provide reference for cross-disciplinary research.
The food supply chain faces unprecedented challenges concerning human health, food security and safety, climate change, animal welfare. In addressing these challenges, ensuring transparency and traceability in the food supply chain is becoming increasingly important issue for reducing food loss and waste and ensuring food safety. In particular, digitalization and new information technologies that are rapidly developing with Industry 4.0 and their applications to the supply chain lead to significant improvements in traceability systems. One of these new technologies is blockchain. The rise of blockchain-based initiatives find use in providing traceability in bringing more transparency and efficiency to the agricultural and food supply chain. Typical outcomes of the chapter are; (i) To list the triple bottom line food supply chain challenges. (ii) To narrate the feasible tracking and tracing solutions with the support of blockchain technology.
The integration of sensors and internet to the supply chain has created a new window in the supply chain management called as virtual supply chain which bears the features such as real-time tracking and monitoring of goods flow in the physical supply chain. The food supply chain is one of the delicate supply chains due to perishability, which can be due to various physical and biological factors, also the stringent safety and sustainability requirements of the product. The use of sensors and IT technology enables real-time data collection of the changes that take place in the food supply chain. The paper presents the integration of blockchain to the current virtual supply chain thus eliminating or changing the roles of intermediaries in the virtual supply chain and facilitating transparency, integrity, and authenticity of the data in the food supply chain.
IoT-enable monitoring can provide valuable information for the shellfish quality evaluation during cold storage condition. However, IoT based information storage relies on the centralized platform, it is possible to tamper. In this paper, we establish blockchain based multi-sensors (WSN) monitoring system to collect quality parameters and verify captured information for improving transparency and trust during cold storage. The implementation of the K-means and SVM algorithms were used in quality evaluation applications to classify and predict the quality loss of frozen shellfish. The results show blockchain based WSN monitoring can achieve the dynamic indicators continuous monitoring and ensures the data security and reliability. The proportion of the training set and the test set in the allowable deviation range is 88.89% and 87.17%. The root mean square error (RMSE) of training set and test set are 0.1502 and 0.1793 by SVM model. The performance of the K-means and SVM model has higher accuracy than BP model. This paper could help to reduce the risk of food losses and improve quality and safety management of frozen shellfish during cold storage.
The frequent occurrence of food safety accidents at the global level has triggered consumer sensitivity. Establishing a food traceability system can effectively guarantee food safety and increase consumer confidence and satisfaction. Existing food traceability systems often ignore environmental factors that affect food quality at all stages of the supply chain, and the authenticity of the information obtained through traceability is difficult to guarantee. In this study, a food supply chain traceability model was established based on blockchain and radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies. The model focused on the traceability of environmental data during the various stages of the food supply chain and combined a centralized database and blockchain for data storage. The lot identification data of the various supply chain stages were stored in a centralized database, while the environmental data were stored in a blockchain. Thereby, the authenticity and accuracy of the traceability data were ensured. The blockchain part of the model has been simulated in the Ethereum test environment, and the experiment has achieved traceability of temperature data.
Blockchain implementation in agriculture has begun. Blockchain is recognized as an emerging technology in the agri-foods industry which may provide an efficient and robust mechanism for enhancing food traceability and a transparent and reliable way to validate quality, safety, and sustainability, of agri-foods. However, the technology is in its nascency, therefore, this review was written to foster discussion and encourage the application of blockchain technology, especially in the agri-food industry. In this review, the working principle of blockchain for data recording and tracking is briefly described. The collaboration models for the current blockchain applications on agri-foods are summarized. Furthermore, the specific utilization of blockchain to enhance safety and quality of agri-foods is discussed in four aspects: enhance the data transparency, realize data traceability, improve the food safety and quality monitoring, and reduce the cost of financial transactions. A case study on a Walmart pork traceability system has been provided to demonstrate how blockchain may be used to enhance the food traceability. Finally, challenges and future trends of blockchain technology in agri-foods concerning data/cost management, data security, and data integration are discussed. Blockchain technology reveals a promising approach to foster a future of agri-foods system in a way that is safer, healthier, more sustainable, and reliable.