Blockchain-based traceability in Agri-Food supply chain management: A practical implementation

TLDR

The rapid adoption of IoT in Agri‑Food supply chains has spurred interest in traceability systems, yet existing centralized solutions suffer from data integrity, tampering, and single points of failure, prompting exploration of blockchain’s decentralized, immutable, and transparent properties. This study introduces AgriBlockIoT, a fully decentralized blockchain‑based traceability platform that seamlessly integrates IoT devices across the Agri‑Food supply chain. The authors implemented a farm‑to‑fork use case, deploying it on both Ethereum and Hyperledger Sawtooth to assess traceability performance. Comparative evaluation revealed differences in latency, CPU, and network usage between the two deployments, highlighting each platform’s strengths and limitations.

Abstract

The recent, exponential rise in adoption of the most disparate Internet of Things (IoT) devices and technologies has reached also Agriculture and Food (Agri-Food) supply chains, drumming up substantial research and innovation interest towards developing reliable, auditable and transparent traceability systems. Current IoT-based traceability and provenance systems for Agri-Food supply chains are built on top of centralized infrastructures and this leaves room for unsolved issues and major concerns, including data integrity, tampering and single points of failure. Blockchains, the distributed ledger technology underpinning cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, represent a new and innovative technological approach to realizing decentralized trustless systems. Indeed, the inherent properties of this digital technology provide fault-tolerance, immutability, transparency and full traceability of the stored transaction records, as well as coherent digital representations of physical assets and autonomous transaction executions. This paper presents AgriBlockIoT, a fully decentralized, blockchain-based traceability solution for Agri-Food supply chain management, able to seamless integrate IoT devices producing and consuming digital data along the chain. To effectively assess AgriBlockIoT, first, we defined a classical use-case within the given vertical domain, namely from-farm-to-fork. Then, we developed and deployed such use-case, achieving traceability using two different blockchain implementations, namely Ethereum and Hyperledger Sawtooth. Finally, we evaluated and compared the performance of both the deployments, in terms of latency, CPU, and network usage, also highlighting their main pros and cons.