Abstract Relationships in multi-tier supply chains (MTSCs) are complex and require constant information sharing. For MTSCs involved in perishable product distribution, blockchain technology (BCT) is one of the most promising technologies that can ensure products’ traceability and safety. This study examines a Portuguese MTSC for frozen fish products piloting BCT adoption for its supply chain (SC) practices. The goal is therefore to explore the consequences of information availability inherent for BCT adoption pilots in the SC context. This study follows a mixed-method approach, with qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques. Three semi-structured interviews with players from a single frozen fish SC, including supplier, transporter, and retailer were conducted. MAXQDA Analytics Pro 2022 software was used for further coding and data analysis. An online survey among retail chain consumers was conducted resulting in 112 responses. Regression analysis and Pearson correlation test were further performed via IBM SPSS Statistics software. Data collection for both parts took place between December 2021 and July 2022. This study explores four layers in the SC– including supplier, transporter, retailer and final consumer. Findings revealed a current lack of extensive and detailed information from upper tiers regarding products’ characteristics. Despite being hyped as a “trust-enabling” technology, BCT was found not to eliminate the need for trustful relationships between players prior to adoption, as information input requires human intervention. Even in those cases when the traceability option is not of major interest to final consumers, findings revealed a higher probability of purchasing fish products that have traceable information available.
The food supply chain, following its globalization, has become very complex. Such complexities, introduce factors that influence adversely the quality of intermediate and final products. Strict constraints regarding parameters such as maintenance temperatures and transportation times must be respected in order to ensure top quality and reduce to a minimum the detrimental effects to public health. This is a multi-factorial endeavor and all of the involved stakeholders must accept and manage the logistics burden to achieve the best possible results. However, such burden comes together with additional complexities and costs regarding data storage, business process management and company specific standard operating procedures and as such, automated methods must be devised to reduce the impact of such intrusive operations. For the above reasons, in this paper we present BioTrak: a platform capable of registering and visualizing the whole chain of transformation and transportation processes including the monitoring of cold chain logistics of food ingredients starting from the raw material producers until the final product arrives to the end-consumer. The platform includes Business Process Modelling methods to aid food supply chain stakeholders to optimize their processes and also integrates a blockchain for guaranteeing the integrity, transparency and accountability of the data.
Claudia Cozzio, Giampaolo Viglia, Linda Lemarié, Stefania Cerutti
The traceability of what we eat is a lingering issue. Blockchain enables transparency across the value chain as it tracks a product’s origin, location, and history. In this work we adopt a mix-method approach - experiment plus qualitative evidence - to understand why consumers consider the traceability offered by blockchain important and what are the barriers that suppliers face when considering blockchain adoption. Our findings show that, when the food is local, blockchain increases consumers’ trust and, in turn, attitudes and behaviors toward the sharing experience. On the supply side, we find that, while operators see key benefits in blockchain adoption – including enhanced trust, they are still hesitant in using the technology because of a greater need for intra-organizational support and a concern in data sharing. By looking at both consumers and suppliers, we offer a complete picture on the integration of blockchain technology in the food supply chain.
The Block chain is a peer to peer, distributed ledger in which members must establish consensus to record every new input and transactions that are stored by all members. Over the last decade, block chain technology has grown in popularity, attracting interest from a wide range of industries, including finance, manufacturing, energy, and government sectors, health, and agriculture supply chains, land registrations, and digital identifications (IDs). Block chain facilitates better opportunities and benefits in agriculture, as well as building trust between farmers and consumers and allowing the creation of reliable food supply chains. The Chapter discusses how block chain and smart contracts can improve productivity, transparency, and traceability in agricultural insurance, smart farming, and agricultural food supply chain transactions (AFSC). By applying Block chain agri-food supply chain tracking was made easy and won the trust from different stakeholders, which was a real benefit to the real heroes of the country. The consumer can research the history of a product they are thinking about buying and consume food in their cart, learning about the entire process from planting to harvesting, transporting, and selling. Food fraud may be reduced by using the traceability and integrity of financial information to detect untrustworthy intermediaries and business practices that exploit both independent farmers and cooperatives. The agricultural industry will be transformed by block chain for supply chain management. All phases of the agriculture supply chain are being simplified, enhancing food safety and preventing the sale of counterfeit goods. Access to agricultural finance services for farmers and companies could also be facilitated by the technology. This Paper presents a review and research challenges on the existing block chain based IoT applications in the agriculture domain where maximum research focuses on food supply chain and its security of Internet of things with Block chain. The chapter presents how block chain and smart contracts can increase productivity, transparency and traceability could be very effective in Agricultural insurance, smart farming, transactions of agricultural food supply chains.
Pedro Vieira de Azevedo, Jorge Gomes, Mário Rom�ão
Abstract In the current global marketplace supply chains can span a huge number of countries, cross many borders and require interoperation of a multitude of organizations. This vastness of supply chains impacts business competitiveness since it adds complexity and can difficult securing traceability, chain of custody and transparency. We propose that assuring chain of custody and traceability via Blockchain (BC) allows organizations to demonstrate product provenance, integrity and compliance. This work proposes that to effect true traceability the more complete approach is to connect both the Supply Chain Actors (SCAs) and products identifications using digital certificates. A Blockchain is used to manage the traceability of products and validation of the identities. Importing, verifying and storing the certificates uses an off-chain data storage solution for products certificates, IDs and data (i.e., WalliD) . To create, validate the certificates and setup the chain of trust a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) was designed as part of the proposal. Our study follows a Design Science research approach aimed to analyse the requirements and propose a solution to a more complete traceability in supply chains. The results were architectural artifacts, including an Ethereum Smart Contract and a PKI based certificate authentication system. The implementation of these deliverables allow for a supply chain system that can provide decentralized and trustful assurance of the provenance, chain of custody and traceability functionalities for all the Organizations and also for the final consumers. To exemplify the problem and demonstrate the applicability of the solution, its potential and benefits we applied it to a real food supply chain use case that already uses provenance certificates and stored them in the blockchain using the before mentioned SmartContract to assure and demonstrate the chain of custody and traceability of the food produce.
Abstract Blockchain technology serves as a framework for addressing the challenge of tracking and marketing materials in distributed networks. Agricultural traceability systems in food production provide farmers with food safety and smart contracts. Smart contracts establish cryptocurrency evidence of delivery with automated bitcoin payments to all parties. In this paper, we propose circular blockchain-based traceability and bitcoin prediction in agricultural food crop system to accomplish transparency and traceability. Bitcoin prediction using LSTM benefits farmers and stakeholders to buy and sell their food crops when the profit is high. Moreover, the proposed system provides safety, consensus, shared ledger, speedy payment, and decentralization. All activities are processed in a distributed shared ledger with connections to a decentralized file system, which makes the supply chain visible and traceable. All the activities that are tied up in the supply chain are transparent to consumers and stakeholders. Traceability of the agricultural product is done efficiently with QR code, which results in a trustable relationship between the farmer and the consumer. Finally, our research shows that the accuracy of LSTM outperforms by 88.67% compared to traditional machine learning algorithms such as SVM and Naive Bayes with accuracy of 62.025% and 75.32% in forecasting the bitcoin price.
In the food supply chain, which starts with the seed that the producer sows in the field, what stages the consumer goes through until it comes to his table, which activities and safety framework are affected by the product/food safety at these stages, and because the said effects are not transparent and knowable, technology is used especially by producers/farmers and consumers. It is planned to build a bridge between /customer with blockchain technology. Literature information about blockchain technology and the sectors where it provides more benefits is given. As a result of the research on supply chain and blockchain technology maturity level in agriculture, it has been determined that the theory part of the technology is developing and there are still problems in practice. Agricultural practices and results on smart agriculture and the adaptation of the agricultural sector to technology in Turkey are emphasized. IBM Food Trust blockchain application was preferred for agricultural/food product application with blockchain technology in supply chain management. A project was proposed for the application of blockchain technology in the agricultural supply chain in Turkey and it was emphasized that it would take time for the producer and private sector to transition to this application without the contribution of public institutions and organizations in the project.
Evripidis P. Kechagias, Sotiris P. Gayialis, Georgios A. Papadopoulos, Georgios Papoutsis
In today's era, humanity has been overwhelmed by technological revolutions that have changed and will continue to change how business operations are performed, directly or indirectly. At the same time, the processes within the supply chain are quite complex, and as technology and processes evolve, they become more and more challenging. Traceability has become a critical issue in the food industry to ensure safety, quality, and compliance with regulations. The adoption of blockchain technology in the food supply chain has gained significant attention as a potential solution to improve traceability. This paper presents the development of a distributed application for table olives' traceability on the Ethereum network. The paper also presents a methodological framework, which can help anyone aiming to implement an Ethereum decentralized application and demonstrates the practical use of the developed application by a Greek table olives producer. The application significantly improved the producer's product traceability by providing a secure, transparent, and efficient solution for tracking and tracing the products in the supply chain. The app reduced the time, increased the accuracy and reliability of data, improved supply chain efficiency, and helped the producer comply with international regulations and standards.
Andry Alamsyah, Sri Widiyanesti, Puspita Wulansari, Eva Nurhazizah · 9 authors
As one of the most popular drinks in the world, coffee has limitations in its complex and opaque supply chain. Consumers have difficulty verifying coffee quality according to the price they pay. However, innovative technologies such as blockchain emerge with the potential to support the coffee supply chain to be more transparent and traceable. Blockchain technology is a distributed database that allows for secure, transparent, and tamper-proof record-keeping, which makes it an ideal tool for tracking the movement of coffee beans throughout the supply chain, from farmers to roasters to retailers. Each step in the coffee supply chain could be logged and tracked using blockchain, thus supporting greater transparency. Traceability would make it easier to identify and track any issues or irregularities in the supply chain. We propose a model to transform a coffee industry supply chain business process into a blockchainable workflow. In addition, an application was developed to allow each stakeholder in the supply chain to contribute to the data collection and monitor the status of each coffee batch. The application prototype was implemented and evaluated in one of the coffee industries in Indonesia. This research will benefit farmers in getting fair prices and end-consumers getting quality assurance.
Ulpan Tokkozhina, Bruno Mataloto, Ana Martins, João C. Ferreira
With the worldwide pandemic outbreak, the style of restaurant food consumption underwent a major shift towards online delivery services. This poses an urgent need in trust between main stakeholders of the process: requiring restaurants to correspond to the quality declared, providing high quality and safe to consume meals, and obliging delivery entities to deliver food carefully, scrupulously following the delivery conditions. In this research, we explore a novelty approach that combines IoT, Blockchain technology, and city LoRa network to create a new trusted, decentralized approach for food distribution process in the context of a Smart City. This approach allows controlling the food delivery process using sensors data to control live location, temperature, vibrations, and shakings during the transportation process. We also suggest a fresh perspective on a rating system of delivery entities, where reputation points will be provided both from the side of the restaurant and the final consumer. This will create more trust towards the delivery entity since information will be tamper-proof and immutable due to the nature of Blockchain. This novel system proposal allows rethinking the online food delivery process in the context of Smart City, using the city's LoRa LPWAN radio frequency technology and Blockchain decentralized solution.
Aayushi Badhwar, Saniyat Islam, Caroline Swee Lin Tan
Blockchain Technology has shown tremendous potential to be a foundation for the currently shifting paradigm towards more traceable and transparent supply chains. This review highlights the opportunities that exist in adapting Blockchain Technology in the fashion and textile supply chain, while also providing insight into the challenges of adopting this technology. This paper provides a systematic review of the potential of Blockchain Technology within the fashion and textile industry’s supply chain to analyse its role in traceability, transparency, and product authenticity. To achieve this, a substantive number of research papers and non-scholarly resources have been scrutinised. An emphasis was placed on topics regarding Blockchain Technology (BT), the fashion and textile industry and supply chain (manufacturing and distribution), traceability, transparency, and product authenticity. The selected research papers range from empirical analysis, argumentative, case studies, opinion articles, review articles, short reports, and book chapters.
This article explores the potential of blockchain database and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to improve the trustworthiness of the agri-food supply chain. It provides an overview of the challenges facing the supply chain, including food safety, traceability, and sustainability, and how blockchain and IoT can address these challenges based on secondary data. This paper presents a case study of a blockchain-based platform that utilizes IoT sensors to provide end- to-end visibility and traceability of food products. The findings demonstrate the potential for this technology to improve food safety, reduce waste, and increase transparency in the agri-food supply chain. Overall, the study demonstrates the potentiality of blockchain and IoT in revolutionizing the agri-food industry and creating a more trustworthy, responsible and sustainable food system.
The availability of food in a country and the capacity of its citizens to access, acquire, and receive enough food are both referred to as having food security. A crucial component of food security is ensuring and maintaining safe and high-quality goods, which the supply chain process should take into due deliberation. To enhance the food supply chain, organic and wholesome food items should be encouraged. Although packaged goods are evaluated and approved by legal authorities, there is no mechanism in place for testing and assessing the market’s available supply on a regular basis. As a result, food manufacturers are compelled to provide nutritious and healthy products. In this research, we propose an explainable artificial intelligence-based faster regions with convolutional neural networks (XAI-based Faster RCNN) model to evaluate the contents of the food items through user-friendly web-based front-end design and QR code. To validate each communication token in the network, an elliptic curve integrated encrypted scheme (ECIES) based on blockchain technology is utilized. Additionally, artificial rabbit optimization (ARO) is used to register each user and assign him a key. The user will gain a deeper understanding of machine learning (ML) and AI applications using the XAI technique. An EAI-based Faster RCNN model is proposed to help digitize information about food products, rapidly retrieve the information, and discover any hidden information in the quick response (QR) code that could have impacted the safety and quality of the food. The results of the experiments indicated that the proposed method requires less response time than other existing methods with the increase of payload and users. The Shapley additive explanation is used to obtain a legal plea for the laboratory test based on the nutritional information present in the QR code. The benefits provided by ECIES-based blockchain technology assist policymakers, manufacturers, and merchants in efficient decision-making, minimizing public health hazards, and improving welfare. This paper also shows that the accuracy achieved by the proposed method reached 99.53%, with the lowest processing time.
S. Thangamayan, Kalyani Pradhan, Ganesh Babu Loganathan, S. Sitender · 6 authors
The typical food traceability system’s data layer is made up of relational databases managed by core businesses, which cannot ensure data security. It is inefficient and requires a lot of upkeep. The food supply chain has numerous actors, making it difficult for consumers to safeguard their rights when purchasing food with quality issues. Due to the numerous organizations involved in the food supply chain, food safety monitoring and traceability have become challenging. The supply chain’s major organizations have control and administrative authority over the data under the current food traceability system, which is overly centralized for traceability information. The safety and dependability of food may be ensured by using the food traceability system to track food information. We can witness a series of detailed insights into food from the manufacturing source to the consumption terminal. A blockchain-based food tracking system is created as a solution to these issues. On the Ethereum platform, the system was created. It was also employed in the blockchain system, in addition to its features of decentralization, tamper-proof, and traceability. To implement the data update service and the food recall function, introduce the Food and Drug Administration node. Consumers have the option to not only enquire about food traceability throughout the manufacturing process but also to file complaints regarding the traceability system’s rights protection.
Food supply chains are highly distributed, collaborative, heterogeneous, diverse, and varied by product, process, and destination. The global food supply chain (FSC) objective is to maintain a good balance between supply and demand and move products from producer to market. However, sustainability of the FSC has become a major concern as limited resources and increasing population pressure threaten its existence. Supply chain management is an important issue for FSC due to information flow throughout the supply chain. Industry-specific characteristics and extensive integration among multiple actors in an entire supply chain exacerbate this situation. The agri-food sector has one of the lowest rates of information technology penetration for innovation. Over the past thirty years, information and communication technology (ICT) has been introduced into the agricultural and food sectors, helping to improve food production and transportation. However, there are various challenges, such as transparency, accountability, food scandal, trust, and inefficient information flow, that the food supply chain is still facing in reaching sustainable goals. The complexity of food supply systems and the opportunities and challenges faced regarding desired sustainability performance need to be examined to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Blockchain is an emerging and disruptive digital technology that can transform governance and sustainability in integrated food supply chains. It provides a transparent, immutable, and traceable ledger that minimizes anomalies and information fraud, making it a potential solution for designing a transparent, traceable food system. Blockchain can potentially improve the sustainability of the food supply chain by providing a transparent traceability system. Food traceability is important for managing the food supply chain and protecting public health. It allows quick and accurate traceability of contaminated food that causes foodborne illness outbreaks, leading to the withdrawal of contaminated food from markets. Blockchain can achieve traceability, provenance tracking, transparency, and reduce environmental impact in the food supply chain. It also helps in achieving sustainable development goals set by the UN. However, there is no scientific research on blockchain’s contribution to achieving these goals in the food supply chain. Therefore, this article presents a systematic literature review and thematic analysis to study the relationship between FSC sustainability, blockchain, and sustainable development goals.
Geneci da Silva Ribeiro Rocha, Diego Durante Mühl, Hermenegildo Almeida Chingamba, Letícia de Oliveira · 5 authors
Information technologies such as blockchain are developing fast, overcoming bottlenecks, and quickly taking advantage of their application. The present study analyzes recent changes concerning the benefits, disadvantages, challenges, and opportunities of blockchain applications in agribusiness. Interviews were conducted with and a questionnaire was applied to professionals working in the development and application of blockchain technology in agribusiness, to compare their perception of the recent advances. The results showed that the importance of blockchain technology to improve governance and information flow along supply chains has increased, and this is the main perceived benefit. The main disadvantages were removing intermediaries and the high cost of implementing the technology. The absence of a widely accepted platform in blockchain operations is the leading and growing challenge, while patterns for blockchain technology seem to be being overcome. The integration of blockchain with new technologies, and the competitiveness provided by the technology, are seen as the main and growing opportunities. Despite the study limitations, we conclude that the benefits and opportunities associated with blockchain application in agribusiness outweigh the challenges and disadvantages in number and importance, and are becoming more relevant.
Francesco Longo, Giovanni Mirabelli, Vittorio Solina, Laura Belli · 14 authors
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted all the weaknesses of manufacturing systems and supply chains. In this challenging context, smallholders have faced several crises mainly related to the difficulty of finding manpower for harvesting activities and the impossibility of distributing food, due to the forced closure of many distribution channels. The main consequences were lost sales and wasted food. With the aim of increasing the responsiveness of smallholders in the face of COVID-like crises, this paper provides an overview of methodologies and approaches currently available in the literature in terms of: ICT tools, blockchain-based solutions, business models, sustainability-oriented frameworks, simulation models. The analysis of the literature provides two main outputs: (1) a list of challenges to be faced in the coming years to improve the working conditions of smallholders, (2) the definition of future research developments, which mainly concern the design of an ICT platform, which integrates multiple technological aspects.
Cold-chain logistics system (CCLS) plays the role of collecting and managing the logistics data of frozen food. However, there always exist problems of information loss, data tampering, and privacy leakage in traditional centralized systems, which influence frozen food security and people’s health. The centralized management form impedes the development of the cold-chain logistics industry and weakens logistics data availability. This paper first introduces a distributed CCLS based on blockchain technology to solve the centralized management problem. This system aggregates the production base, storage, transport, detection, processing, and consumer to form a cold-chain logistics union. The blockchain ledger guarantees that the logistics data cannot be tampered with and establishes a traceability mechanism for food safety incidents. Meanwhile, to improve the value of logistics data, a Stackelberg game-based resource allocation model has been proposed between the logistics data resource provider and the consumer. The competition between resource price and volume balances the resource supplement and consumption. This model can help to achieve an optimal resource price when the Stackelberg game obtains Nash equilibrium. The two participants also can maximize their revenues with the optimal resource price and volume by utilizing the backward induction method. Then, the performance evaluations of transaction throughput and latency show that the proposed distributed CCLS is more secure and stable. The simulations about the variation trend of data price and amount, optimal benefits, and total benefits comparison of different forms show that the resource allocation model is more efficient and practical. Moreover, the blockchain-based CCLS and Stackelberg game-based resource allocation model also can promote the value of logistic data and improve social benefits.
Ilhaam A. Omar, Raja Jayaraman, Khaled Salah, Haya R. Hasan · 6 authors
Crop insurance serves as a crucial risk mitigation strategy for farmers facing uncertainties stemming from unpredictable weather conditions and vulnerabilities within the agricultural production process. Unfortunately, the prevailing traditional methods of crop insurance are laden with complexities, high costs, and, more critically, a lack of trust, which has deterred farmers from safeguarding their crops. Addressing these challenges, we present an innovative blockchain-based crop index insurance solution aimed at delivering multiple benefits. Our solution leverages blockchain technology to ensure unprecedented transparency throughout the insurance ecosystem. Every transaction and data exchange among farmers, insurers, and weather data providers is recorded on an immutable ledger, fostering trust, accountability, and confidence among all stakeholders. Moreover, blockchain’s inherent immutability and the use of smart contracts mitigate the risk of fraudulent activities in the crop insurance domain. Claims are processed autonomously, significantly reducing the possibility of fraudulent claims and enhancing the integrity of the system. One of the primary concerns of farmers, delayed claim settlements, is addressed by our solution. Smart contracts enable automated and prompt claim processing, ensuring that farmers receive timely payouts. Furthermore, our solution substantially reduces costs by eliminating intermediaries and streamlining administrative processes. This affordability democratizes crop insurance, making it accessible to a broader spectrum of farmers, including those in low-income countries. Our comprehensive approach integrates advanced algorithms for secure information sharing and interaction among stakeholders. We have rigorously tested the smart contract code under diverse scenarios using the Remix IDE, with the code’s availability on GitHub as a reference. Security vulnerabilities have been meticulously assessed and addressed. Thus, our paper presents an effective, low-cost, and trustworthy solution utilizing blockchain-based smart contracts to facilitate timely crop insurance for farmers. By enhancing transparency, reducing fraud, expediting claim processing, and increasing affordability, our solution aims to revolutionize crop insurance, making it more accessible and reliable for farmers worldwide.
While there is consensus that blockchain technology can improve supply chain transparency and operational efficiency, scholars and practitioners have only recently considered how blockchain could improve the sustainability of supply chains. This article contributes to this emerging body of work by considering how to use blockchain to enable sustainable food supply chains. To advance the use of blockchain for sustainability in the food supply chain context, this study proposes a blockchain-enabled architectural framework for trustworthy communication about the sustainability attributes of food products. The blockchain-enabled architectural framework outlines a multi-layered architecture for utilising blockchain-based traceability as a way to signal to consumers the trustworthy sustainability attributes of a particular food product. This kind of sustainability communication enables the accessibility of traceable and verifiable evidence and therefore can significantly enhance the reliability and trustworthiness of sustainable claims/credentials compared to printed food labels or other digital means of communication. The study contributes to sustainability communication empowered by blockchain-based traceability and offers invaluable insights to both researchers and practitioners in the industry 4.0 landscape.