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.
Halal food is food in which its halalness status is regulated by a shariah institution, which is normally designated by the government. The halal status of food should be traced starting from raw materials, processing, packaging, transportation and distribution processes to end consumers. This is to make sure that halal food is free from any contamination that may change its halal status. The problem is the difficulty of tracing halal food along the supply chain as the supply chain information from the upstream to downstream in the food industry is not transparent. Currently, food tracking systems are a centralized system, where information about food status is only available to those who control the information. To improve the transparency of the food status and to increase trust from customers, a distributed and transparent system, where many parties can access the food status any time, is needed. Blockchain technology can be applied to help track the halalness status of food along its supply chain. As blockchain is inherently distributed and transparent, hence a distributed system can be developed by incorporating blockchain technology for tracking food status. This paper proposes a distributed system for tracing halal food along its supply chains using blockchain technology. This system is expected to support transparency, neutrality.
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.
Blockchain is today one of the most interesting and debated research topics. Blockchain technology was implemented for the first time in the financial sector a few years ago. However, it is currently used in many other areas, such as: healthcare, smart cities, smart contracts, energy markets, government sector. The success of this technology mainly lies in the following properties: reliability, transparency, immutability. In this study, we collect and analyze the main contributions in the literature about the application of blockchain in the agricultural sector, focusing on food traceability issues. Considering the quick growth of this technology and the high number of published documents in recent months, there is a need to catalog the different methodologies, proposed by the various scholars. Our aim is to detect the current research trends and possible future challenges. In the agricultural context, the need for an adequate traceability system is motivated by several bad habits and problems, such as the wide use of pesticides and fertilizers in fruits and vegetables, which are extremely harmful for human health. Moreover, in the last few years, the consumers’ attention about the quality of agricultural products has considerably increased. The present study shows that the blockchain technology is still in its early stage. Although there are several proposals in the literature, still a limited number of applications have been put into use in the real context. From the point of view of scientific research, only some countries are investing in this technology: China and United States are among the most active, but Italy is also very involved in this phenomenon. Overall, the blockchain technology appears very promising, but still many efforts are needed to reach the maturation stage.
In recent years, various food-safety issues have aroused public concern regarding safety in the food supply chain. Since grains are closely linked to human life and health, it is necessary to effectively manage information in the grain supply chain. The grain supply chain is characterized by a long life cycle, complex links, various hazards, and heterogeneous information sources. Problems with traditional traceability systems include easy data tampering, difficult hazardous-material information management, the “information isolated island” problem, and low traceability efficiency in the whole supply chain. Blockchain is a distributed computing paradigm characterized by decentralization, network-wide recording, security, and reliability. As such, it can reduce administrative costs and improve the efficiency of information management. Based on literature research and a field investigation of wheat-processing enterprises in Shandong Province, We analyze the operation process of grain supply chain. This study, therefore, proposed a new system architecture in the entire grain supply chain based on blockchain technology and designed a multimode storage mechanism that combines chain storage. This prototype system was tested and verified using actual cases and application scenarios. Compared to traditional systems, the proposed system is characterized by data security and reliability, information interconnection and intercommunication, real-time sharing of hazardous-material information, and dynamic and credible whole-process tracing. As such, this system is highly significant and has reference value for guaranteeing food quality and safety-process traceability.
Tanvir Ferdousi, Don Gruenbacher, Caterina Scoglio
Distributed ledgers using blockchain have gained traction in the supply chain industry due to their unique features of immutability and transparency. They have given people the abilities to solve business problems which were impossible using traditional systems. The US beef cattle industry lacks adequate traceability as most of the farm owners consider such data confidential; possibly harming their businesses if exposed. This article attempts to solve this problem by proposing a smart contract-based supply chain framework using a permissioned blockchain network. This system supports anonymity for the users to protect identities and lets every user store their data locally, while ensuring that the changes are recorded in the chain with cryptographic proofs (hashes). The proposed framework also has methods for the users to perform business transactions and transfer animal-related data to new owners as required. In addition to that, smart contracts have been added to conduct anonymous surveys for data aggregation. The technical contribution of this article is in the system design on how users, data, and communications are handled to maintain data ownership and user privacy while ensuring immutability and confidentiality at different levels of data aggregation. This article also contains an evaluation of the system using integration tests where the outcomes meet the expected design requirements. The framework can be applied to the US beef cattle industry as well as other supply chains with minimal modifications.
This paper analyses how blockchain technology works in agri-food supply chains. It also intends to identify the benefits and limitations associated with the potential widespread use of this technology to improve efficiency and sustainability performance. Despite the undeniable benefits of blockchain and the possible improvements to enhance transparency, reliability and accuracy of information, considerable challenges to its widespread adoption persist. The transformational potential of blockchain technology can be unlocked by: a) the creation of a pre-competitive space for unprecedented horizontal collaboration amongst supply chain actors to reduce cost and maximise benefits; b) the redesign of centralised governance systems of existing tracking and information-sharing platforms; c) the integration of blockchain and Internet of Things devices.
Innovative technology is known of its crucial role towards cocoa production. Just as other cash crops, cocoa also generates income as well as offers direct or indirect employment to majority of people. Ghana is the second leading producer of cocoa beans in the world and has been earmarked as 2019 world's fastest growing economy by IMF in its World Economic Outlook. IMF predicts a growth rate of 8.8% for Ghana and 7.5% for Cote D'Ivoire as the second runner up. This research therefore assessed the role of innovative technology in cocoa beans food supply chain.The main objective of this study was to evaluate the contributions made by innovative technology through the application of blockchain technology towards effectiveness of cocoa bean food supply chain. The study also looked into how blockchain technology contributed in addressing common unethical issues in cocoa production. To achieve these objectives, a secondary source of data was analyzed and questionnaire was also administered to various cocoa farmers.Earlier findings from the literature review and other existing academic sources suggested that cocoa bean food supply chain is quite cumbersome and complex. However, it was found that, the application of blockchain technology has increased traceability and transparency in cocoa bean supply chains. The study also revealed that unethical activities in cocoa industry have decreased drastically.The contributions made by the study to the existing body of literature are twofold: (1) it made us understood how innovative technology through blockchain positively affects cocoa production; (2) it also showed how blockchain technology can be incorporated into cocoa bean food supply chains to enhance transparency, traceability and mitigate unethical activities in cocoa production.