Blockchain Papers

Borja Bordel, Pierre Lebigot, Ramón Alcarria, Tomás Robles

No abstract is available for this record.

Fabian Sander, Janjaap Semeijn, Dominik Mahr

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate meat traceability by outlining the different perspectives and opinions of meat supply chain stakeholders (SCSs); it also evaluates potential of acceptance of blockchain technology (BCT) as a viable transparency and traceability system (TTS). Design/methodology/approach A questionnaire survey of 141 consumers reveals their opinions about TTSs. In addition, semi-structured interviews with seven retail managers, four government officials and one blockchain service provider (Project Provenance Ltd) provide expert insights. Findings The results demonstrate that consumers are overwhelmed by the amount and complexity of certification labels. As a TTS, BCT implementation appears to have significant positive influences on consumers’ purchasing decisions, mediated by consumers’ quality perceptions. This study reveals the discordant perspectives of different stakeholders with regard to the importance of a BCT-based TTS. Originality/value This study investigates current TTSs and certification labels, and probes customer perception of a potential BCT-based solution for meat traceability. Changes to supply chains’ mentality and the active establishment of trust in BCT applications are needed. Firms should take both holistic and altruistic views to deal with the challenges of TTSs in the meat supply chain. The adoption of BCT, in combination with DNA coding, seems promising as a solution to many of the issues that currently plague TTSs.

Reshma Kamath

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.

Miao Guo, XIAO JIN LIU, Wei Zhang

The traditional way of tracking food quality through the supply chain can be a difficult task. The most essential issue is food contamination. It often takes weeks even months to identify when and where a food product was contaminated. Another critical point is complex overlapping distribution and processing ecosystem involving farms, distributors, retailers and consumers, which makes it difficult to assure food provenance. Our SafeFood solution using blockchain and Internet of Things technologies can quickly track a food product's process from farm to storage shelf. In the context of food supply, a blockchain could be used to keep track and history of every single item processed throughout the supply chain. With the Hyperledger Fabric, all the food information is collected into the blockchain throughout every step in the supply chain to offer a more efficient way to figure out when and where food items were contaminated, which can help producers the limited contagions by public health officials . The benefits of more transparent food supply chain include: (1) increase the trust multiplied by each participant in food supply chain; (2) identify the source of compromised food and reduce the unnecessarily broad recall, (3) improve the co-ordination in food supply chain; (4) increase operation efficiency; (5) provide better food safety, more freshness and avoid food fraud for customer.

Najihah Razman

Food wastage is an issue that people take it lightly, somehow this issue can lead to bad behavior and unfriendly environment. In Malaysia, people go on a food wasting spree without remorse. It influences the greater part of our lives and will influence us for quite a long time to come. People need to understand what happens if they keep on being irresponsible and ignorance towards food that they wasted, and only then will they get a better understanding of what is at stake and start to manage their waste better. This research is to analyze the issues that the government has been faced with food wastage effects the authority that must be solved. Other than that, from this research is to observe the behavior of people in a certain area which Bukit Antarabangsa has been chosen as the place for me to do my case study on food wastage issue. This behavior might be influenced by some social factors as social proof and diffusion of responsibility. From the questionnaire that has been distributed, it can analyze what is the factors that lead people to wasting food. And from the result from observation and questionnaire that has been taken and what food do people usually people throw away, the researcher will create awareness by using advertising as a platform. In another way, is to educate Malaysian people to be more responsible in preventing on food wastage practice.

Bowen Tan, Jiaqi Yan, Si Chen, Xingchen Liu

No abstract is available for this record.

Manish Kumar, N. Ch. S. N. Iyengar

No abstract is available for this record.

Yu‐Pin Lin, Joy R. Petway, Johnathen Anthony, Hussnain Mukhtar · 7 authors

Blockchain technology, while still challenged with key limitations, is a transformative Information and Communications Technology (ICT) that has changed our notion of trust. Improved efficiencies for agricultural sustainable development has been demonstrated when ICT-enabled farms have access to knowledge banks and other digital resources. UN FAO-recommended ICT e-agricultural infrastructure components are a confluence of ICT and blockchain technology requirements. When ICT e-agricultural systems with blockchain infrastructure are immutable and distributed ledger systems for record management, baseline agricultural environmental data integrity is safeguarded for those who participate in transparent data management. This paper reviewed blockchain-based concepts associated with ICT-based technology. Moreover, a model ICT e-agriculture system with a blockchain infrastructure is proposed for use at the local and regional scale. To determine context specific technical and social requirements of blockchain technology for ICT e-agriculture systems, an evaluation tool is presented. The proposed system and tool can be evaluated and applied to further developments of e-agriculture systems.

Feng Tian

In recent times food safety has drawn upsurge of academic and commercial concerns. In supply chain area, with the rapid growth of internet technologies, a lot of emerging technologies have been applied in traceability systems. However, to date, nearly all of these systems are centralized which are monopolistic, asymmetric and opaque that could result in the trust problem, such as fraud, corruption, tampering and falsifying information. Besides, centralized system is vulnerable to collapse, since a single point of breakdown will lead the whole system to be crashed. Today, a new technology called the blockchain which is a ground-breaking innovation in decentralized information technology presents a whole new approach. However, since this technology is still in its early stages, it has some inherent defects, in which scalability become a primary and urgent one when we face the mass data in the real world. In this paper we will build a food supply chain traceability system for real-time food tracing based on HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points), blockchain and Internet of things, which could provide an information platform for all the supply chain members with openness, transparency, neutrality, reliability and security. Furthermore, we introduce a new concept BigchainDB to fill the gap in the decentralized systems at scale. The paper concludes with a description of a use case and the challenges to adopt blockchain technology in the future food supply chain traceability systems are discussed.

Henry Kim, Marek Laskowski

No abstract is available for this record.

Feng Tian

For the past few years, food safety has become an outstanding problem in China. Since traditional agri-food logistics pattern can not match the demands of the market anymore, building an agri-food supply chain traceability system is becoming more and more urgent. In this paper, we study the utilization and development situation of RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification) and blockchain technology first, and then we analyze the advantages and disadvantages of using RFID and blockchain technology in building the agri-food supply chain traceability system; finally, we demonstrate the building process of this system. It can realize the traceability with trusted information in the entire agri-food supply chain, which would effectively guarantee the food safety, by gathering, transferring and sharing the authentic data of agri-food in production, processing, warehousing, distribution and selling links.

Annelies De Meyer, Dirk Cattrysse, Pieter Ostermeyer, Jos Van Orshoven

No abstract is available for this record.