Blockchain on agri-food supply chains: emerging opportunities

Blockchain technology has been known as a digital currency platform since the emergence of Bitcoin, cryptocurrency. It is one of the most challenging innovations of today. The decentralized distributed transaction ledger of blockchain itself is providing fault-tolerance, immutability, transparency and full traceability of the stored transaction records and coherent digital representations of physical assets and autonomous transaction executions in the entire network. The blockchain technology is already in the industry. Everybody knows it , but the main challenge is how to apply it to the real business processes.

In a world operating 7/24 and volitile, uncertain, complex and moreover agile environment, the pace of business is accelerating. The ability of businesses to adapt, stay ahead of the competition, meet global customer demands and expectations; is largely dependent on their supply chain. The supply chain impacts everything from the quality, delivery and costs of products and services, to customer service and satisfaction and in the end profitability. The innovation era makes the difference between success and stagnation. Due to the fact, the supply chains are under increasing pressure to improve their efficiency, collaboration and innovation to overcome the complications. By adoption of blockchain technology, supply chains can deliver more value to the businesses by real-time, end-to-end visibility and accurate way of monitoring product location at the point of origin.

Food safety has become an outstanding problem all over the globe in the past few years. The change in the consuming habits of people draws more attention to food safety and quality. Traditional agri-food supply chain process does not meet the market and consumer demands anymore, building a more complex global system with transparency, traceability and auditability is becoming more and more urgent. Traditional agri-food logistics and supply chain process do not meet the market and consumer demands anymore, building an agri-food supply chain traceability system is becoming more and more urgent. Especially, since after the corona virus outbreak is called pandemic on the globe.

Combining improvements in agri-food production with growing trade from globalization has lead to an increasingly more complex global supply chain to emerge. Today, the vast majority of traditional logistic information systems in agri-food supply chains mostly track and store orders and deliveries, without providing features as transparency, traceability and auditability. These features would surely improve food quality and safety, therefore they are more and more requested by consumers. The use of the Blockchain technology and developing its standards in the agri-food supply chain domain is still an under-explored, yet worth-to-explore field.

So, let’s keep in track…