In response to food contamination scandals worldwide, retail giant Walmart is tackling food safety in the supply chain using blockchain technology. In 2016, it established the Walmart Food Safety Collaboration Center in Beijing and plans to invest $25 million over five years to research global food safety (Yiannas and Liu, 2017). Using IBM’s blockchain solution based on Hyperledger Fabric, Walmart has successfully completed two blockchain pilots: pork in China and mangoes in the Americas (IBM, 2017). With a farm-to-table approach, Walmart’s blockchain solution reduced time for tracking mango origins from seven days to 2.2 seconds and promoted greater transparency across Walmart’s food supply chain (Yiannas, 2017). IBM called it “complete end-to-end traceability” (McDermott, 2017). The case highlights the challenges of implementing blockchain technology in the food supply chain and the opportunities for deploying blockchain solutions throughout the global food ecosystem to increase safety and reduce waste.
With the rapid growth of China's economy, people's living standard has been increased continuously, which changed the consuming habit of consumers, and more and more attention is paid to food safety and quality. However, in recent years, a series of serious food safety incidents occurred, such as "Sudan red", "clenbuterol", "Sanlu toxic milk powder" and "trench oi". It is worth noting that not only in China, but even in Europe these kinds of scandals have broken out during the past 20 years, including Escherichia coliin hamburgers, Salmonella in eggs, poultry and pork, Listeria in pates and cheeses, and the "horse meat scandal" in 2013. These food safety problems not only harm people's health, but also undermine their trust in food markets. <br/> The main purpose of this cumulative dissertation is trying to guarantee the food quality and safety from a supply chain management perspective, and the key issue is building a decentralized information system which is not dependent on the trust of a central authority or organization for the whole food supply chain. By using the internet of things and blockchain technologies, this new decentralized information system could become a disruptive innovation which could provide an information platform for all supply chain members (including government departments and third-party regulators) based on openness, transparency, neutrality, reliability and security. We want to establish a food supply chain traceability system for real-time food tracing, build a safety control system for food supply chain by integrating it with general supply chain risk management methods, and significantly improve the performance of the food logistics company. All of these will ultimately enhance the safety assurance of a food supply chain.
The work conducted for this thesis is meant to benefit both industry and the scientific community. Creating an assessment for blockchain technology in a specific industrial (supply chain) setting and later expand to a more general setting might prove useful for companies planning to use blockchain in the future or wanting to understand blockchain technology better. There is scarce academic research on blockchain technology in fields besides computer science and finance. Expanding the research territory is key to understand this new technological trend and in the case of supply chain management, blockchain technology might prove to be a key technological development in the years to come. This thesis is formed as an assessment of the strategic fit of blockchain technology in Norwegian fish supply chains. Further, the key findings from this specific strategic fit is used to find indicators for which types of supply chains blockchain technology could bring positive strategic implications. The thesis is structured so that relevant scientific theory and data is presented before making an assessment of the strategic fit and discussing the implications. Using the theory on supply chain management Fisher (1997) and Lee (2002) and key supply chain management objectives together with theory on innovation, through Rogers (1962), the following research questions were answered.\n\nRQ1: Why is blockchain technology beneficial for fish supply chains?\nRQ1.1: How is it beneficial?\nRQ1.2: Does the findings indicate benefits for other supply chains?\n\nThe research arrived at the conclusion that Norwegian fish supply chains might benefit from blockchain technology. This is mainly a conclusion drawn by the fact that Norwegian aquaculture producers were viewed to have lean supply chains and have functional products in the material flows as found through the models of Fisher (1997) and Lee (2002), and that the supply chain management objectives cost, quality and sustainability, with the cost and quality being integral to lean supply chain practices, were found to get the highest advantages. In addition, blockchain technology was found to benefit lean supply chains in general, especially food supply chains.
Vinay Reddy Mallidi, V. Madhu Viswanatham, P. Ashok Kumar
For the past few years, the market has changed a lot and it has become dynamic and demanding which has put the market into a competitive environment. The supply chain plays a crucial role to adapt the business to the dynamic environment as it is very reliant on collaboration integration as well as flexibility. The applications related to the supply chain have gotten the attention of many business owners and to improve the flow control of the supply chain many specialized applications are implemented. One of the most important new technological applications in the supply chain is blockchain technology which has garnered the attention of many business owners as it can be quickly adapted to dynamic market conditions and in the business environment. One upon reading this will get to know about the effect of blockchain technology utilization on this field. The results of the research paper recommend that companies invest in blockchain technology so that the supply chain becomes more transparent, flexible, and secure. There is no doubt in the fact that blockchain technology plays an important role in developing trust with the stakeholder of the supply chain. In the end, the research paper has also given some considerations on the implications that are positive as well as the potential of the blockchain in the field of collaboration and integration.
Kamanashis Biswas, Vallipuram Muthukkumarasamy, Wee Lum Tan
The necessity of wine supply chain traceability system is inevitable due to increase in counterfeiting, adulteration, and use of excessive preservatives and hazardous chemicals. To overcome these issues, wine industry is in need of a traceability system which enables a consumer to verify the composition of each batch of wines from the grape growers to the retailers. However, most of the current systems are RFID and web based and thus it is possible to counterfeit stored information as required. This study proposes a blockchain based wine supply chain traceability system where every transaction is recorded as a block in the chain and is visible to the relevant participants. These blocks of information is immutable since any change to the recorded information will break the chain. In addition to providing quality information management framework, the proposed traceability system enables transparency, safety, and security in the overall process from the grape to the bottle.
An interesting research problem in our age of Big Data is that of determining provenance. Granular evaluation of provenance of physical goods--e.g. tracking ingredients of a pharmaceutical or demonstrating authenticity of luxury goods--has often not been possible with today's items that are produced and transported in complex, inter-organizational, often internationally-spanning supply chains. Recent adoption of Internet of Things and Blockchain technologies give promise at better supply chain provenance. We are particularly interested in the blockchain as many favoured use cases of blockchain are for provenance tracking. We are also interested in applying ontologies as there has been some work done on knowledge provenance, traceability, and food provenance using ontologies. In this paper, we make a case for why ontologies can contribute to blockchain design. To support this case, we analyze a traceability ontology and translate some of its representations to smart contracts that execute a provenance trace and enforce traceability constraints on the Ethereum blockchain platform.