Nuraslina Zainal Abidin, Firdaus Fanny Putera Perdana
Despite rooted from Islamic needs, Halal certification also attracts both Muslims and non-Muslims. In fact, the non-Muslim players are the ones dominating the industry. It is widely known that Halal food chain is quite vulnerable due to complications in maintaining Halal integrity, the necessity to prevent doubtful materials, lack of control of food norms, and the importance to retain high quality. The presence of Halal certification is a form of consumer protection and therefore, the integrity of Halal certification must be carefully monitored. There are some Halal violation cases and this can potentially affect the reputation of the Halal food products. Therefore, it is important to develop a system that integrates a verifiable, open, and safe shared database that is not run by a centralized operator. Blockchain technology is the one that offers such. The study presents a framework for blockchain technology for Halal product verification for manufactured food products. The results are desired to help the food industry players in maintaining a system that can improve the transparency and the integrity of their Halal food chain. The system also intends to ensure the affordability and accessibility of Halal certification for as many industry players as possible as blockchain technology is believed to remove the complications in the certification process and reduce paperwork related cost.
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.
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.
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.
Antonio Arena, Alessio Bianchini, Pericle Perazzo, Carlo Vallati · 5 authors
Urban population is expected to continuously grow in size. The smart city concepts allows to handle the new challenges and issues created by this growth by applying a wide range of technologies that can provide citizens with a better living environment. Smart agriculture will play an important part of smart cities, as a sustainable and high quality food supply chain is crucial to facilitate the grow of human agglomerates. In this context, European laws imposes very strict requirements in the food industry, in order to ensure that food provenance is always guaranteed. Such fine-grained traceability can be only achieved by applying state-of-the-art technologies. In this paper, we present BRUSCHETTA, a blockchain-based application for the traceability and the certification of the Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO) supply chain. EVOO is an emblematic food product for Italy, but it is also one of the most falsified ones. BRUSCHETTA provides a blockchain-based system to enforce the certification of this product by tracing its entire supply chain: from the plantation to the shops. The goal is to enable the final customer to access a tamper-proof history of the product, including the farming, harvesting, production, packaging, conservation, and transportation processes. BRUSCHETTA leverages Internet of Things (IoT) technologies in order to interconnect sensors dedicated to EVOO quality control, and to let them operate on the blockchain. We also provide a support for the correct tailoring of the BRUSCHETTA blockchain system, and we propose a mechanism for its dynamic auto-tuning to optimize it in case of high loads.
This paper proposes a generic agri-food supply chain traceability system based on blockchain technology implementing the "from-farm-to-fork" (F2F) model currently used in the European Union, which can integrate current traceability rules and processes. The proposed system allows the consumer to reconstruct the product history up to the origin in order to verify product health and quality by simple QR code scan. The blockchain chosen for this purpose is Hyperledger Sawtooth, issued with writing permissions and rules to guarantee access only to members recognized as legitimate participants in the process. The whole system has been realized according to an agile methodology (ABCDE), recently devised for designing a general blockchain system with software engineering practices by mean of User Stories and UML diagrams, in order to obtain a higher software quality. All of the involved operators are able to identify any participants along the entire supply chain, increasing the degree of trust between organizations and individuals, with autonomous management of temporal sequence of activities.
The issue of food traceability is one that affects a great number of sectors and policy areas. Within the EU, there is increasing demand from consumers, businesses and institutions to have more direct access to information about how food is produced, transformed, and distributed. Currently, however, practices in the industry are very much open to human error. Databases are highly vulnerable to inaccuracies and hacking, as well as deliberate faults caused by corruption or fraudulent conduct. With food traceability being so closely related to trade and public health issues, there is arguably increasing incentive for the EU to seek alternative tools to increase transparency and accountability throughout supply chains. Consequently, this paper will examine a possible alternative to current practices by evaluating the applicability of 'blockchain' technology, namely a system of digitised, decentralised ledgers, which could allow key stakeholders to access information about the provenance of food immediately, comprehensively and securely. The analysis will focus specifically on Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO), one of the most adulterated products in the food industry, identifying gaps and opportunities in current traceability systems. The research question tackled in this paper, therefore, may be formulated as follows: how and to what extent could blockchain technology constitute a sustainable solution for improving the traceability of EVOO within the EU? The paper begins with a brief overview of the issue and an explanation of the research methodology used, followed by an elaboration of key terms and concepts and a detailed explanation of the principles underlying blockchain technology. Subsequently, the key challenges and opportunities associated with blockchain-based traceability systems are examined through a case study, followed by an analysis aimed at assessing the sustainability of blockchain solutions for the EVOO sector. The conclusion, lastly, provides an overview of relevant findings and proposes a final assessment.
Recently, Halal food has drawn remarkable attention of many consumers around the world. Besides to being unsafe, Halal food such as meat can encounter several issues throughout its supply chain and logistics. At any time, Halal integrity is not guaranteed and risks of becoming non-Halal is the major concern of all parties along the supply chain. To respond to Muslim consumers’ trust concerns in Halal food, many traceability systems were proposed in previous studies based on emerging technologies and recommended to be incorporated into Halal food supply chains. Nevertheless, all of these systems are centralized, opaque and not enough transparent. To mitigate these problems, blockchain technology is introduced as a ground-breaking innovation with greater decentralization, visibility and transparency. This paper makes a major contribution in suggesting Halal meat supply chain traceability system for real-time food tracing based on embedding Islamic dietary law into HACCP, blockchain and Internet of Things.
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.
Summary 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, interorganizational, often internationally spanning supply chains. Recent adoptions of the Internet of Things and blockchain technologies give promise at better supply‐chain provenance. We are particularly interested in the blockchain, as many favored 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.
A blockchain is a public ledger for recording transactions, maintained by<br> many nodes without central authority through a distributed cryptographic<br> protocol. All nodes validate the information to be appended to the<br> blockchain, and a consensus protocol ensures that the nodes agree on a<br> unique order in which entries are appended. Consensus protocols for<br> tolerating Byzantine faults have received renewed attention because they<br> also address blockchain systems. However, amid the current hype around<br> blockchains, cryptocurrencies, fintech startups, and novel consensus<br> mechanisms, it is sometimes overlooked that assessing and gaining<br> confidence in the resilience of a protocol is a difficult task. We argue that developing consensus protocols is similar to engineering<br> cryptographic systems, and that blockchain developers should look towards<br> the established experience in cryptography and security with building<br> trustworthy systems. Otherwise, it might be dangerous to entrust<br> financial value to new protocols. Public discussion, expert reviews,<br> broad validation, and standards recommendations should be employed,<br> following the established practice in cryptography and security.<br>