Author(s)

MIAO GUO, XIAO JIN LIU, WEI ZHANG

Abstract

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.

Keywords

blockchain, Hyperledger Fabric, Internet of Things, food provenance