FoodSQRBlock: Digitizing food production & supply chain with blockchain & QR code in the cloud

Abstract

<div><div><div><p>Food safety is an important issue in today’s world. Traditional agri-food production system doesn’t offer easy traceability of the produce at any point of the supply chain, and hence, during a food-borne outbreak, it is very difficult to sift through food production data to track produce and origin of the outbreak. In recent years, blockchain based food production system has resolved this challenge, however, none of the proposed methodologies makes the food production data easily accessible, traceable and verifiable by consumers or producers using mobile/edge devices. In this paper, we propose FoodSQRBlock (Food Safety Quick Response Block), a blockchain technology based framework, which digitizes the food production information, and makes it easily accessible, traceable and verifiable by the consumers and producers by using QR codes. We also propose a large scale integration of FoodSQRBlock in the cloud to show the feasibility and scalability of the framework, and experimental evaluation to prove that.</p></div></div></div>

Assessing the Impact of COVID-19 on Sustainable Food Supply Chains

“…According to literature, traceability provides sustainability in the production stage of food supply chains [9]. The traceability of the production process, which is the first stage of the food supply chain, ensures that the production supply chain starts error-free from the first stage [14]. Moreover, traceability in food supply chains helps to prevent losses in the production process and supports increased sustainability in food supply chain [15].…”

“…Especially in uncertain times such as the COVID-19 pandemic, tracing production process provides to increase responsiveness of food supply chains from the beginning section of the supply chain [11,16]. Furthermore, food safety and security are an important sustainability factors based on stages of sustainable food supply chains [14]. Especially in the production stage of food supply chains, there can be food fraud and losses because of the lack of safety and security issues [16].…”

“…Traceability [9,14,15] Food safety and security [14,16] Know-how transfer [5,14,[17][18][19][20] Information sharing [19,20] Logistics Networking [13,[21][22][23][24] Risk mitigation [24,25] Responsiveness [25][26][27][28] Employee Commitment [29,30] Innovation [31][32][33] Managerial Approaches [34,35] After the production stage of food supply chains, the processing stage is another critical stage for sustainable food supply chains [18]. The majority of losses in food supply chains come from the processing stage [14]. In the processing stage, lack of knowledge in processes, traditional methods of operations [5] and, most importantly, the lack of knowhow threaten the sustainability of food supply chains [18].…”

“…Since food supply chains covers vulnerable products, the distribution stage is critical for sustainable food supply chains [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. Dependant on food type, distribution routes, networks or vehicle conditions may change [22].…”