Blockchain-Based Traceability and Visibility for Agricultural Products: A Decentralized Way of Ensuring Food Safety in India

TLDR

Globalization has expanded the food supply chain, heightening the importance of farm‑to‑fork safety and quality certification, and increasing threats to food security have created a pressing need for a revolutionary traceability system to ensure product safety. The study proposes a blockchain-based solution that eliminates centralized structures and intermediaries, optimizes performance, and ensures high safety and integrity. The approach uses smart contracts to monitor and manage all supply‑chain communications and transactions, verifying them and storing records in a centralized interplanetary file system database. The system delivers a secure, cost‑effective, transparent, and traceable supply chain, achieving 161 transactions per second with a 4.82‑second convergence time and proving effective for agricultural product traceability.

Abstract

The globalization of the food supply chain industry has significantly emerged today. Due to this, farm-to-fork food safety and quality certification have become very important. Increasing threats to food security and contamination have led to the enormous need for a revolutionary traceability system, an important mechanism for quality control that ensures sufficient food supply chain product safety. In this work, we proposed a blockchain-based solution that removes the need for a secure centralized structure, intermediaries, and exchanges of information, optimizes performance, and complies with a strong level of safety and integrity. Our approach completely relies on the use of smart contracts to monitor and manage all communications and transactions within the supply chain network among all of the stakeholders. Our approach verifies all of the transactions, which are recorded and stored in a centralized interplanetary file system database. It allows a secure and cost-effective supply chain system for the stakeholders. Thus, our proposed model gives a transparent, accurate, and traceable supply chain system. The proposed solution shows a throughput of 161 transactions per second with a convergence time of 4.82 s, and was found effective in the traceability of the agricultural products.