Unibright Diaries — Using Blockchain for Food Traceability and Control

In our blog post about “Blockchain enabled business processes” we showed how and why business processes can make use of blockchain technology using the Unibright Framework. Today we would like to present how blockchain technology can be used for food traceability and control.

The food supply chain is one of the most complex and fragmented of all supply chains. The production is found all over the world both on land and in water, making many producers and intermediaries difficult to identify and track. This brings uncertainty and risk to all stakeholders in the production chain. Lowering this uncertainty comes at a cost, and the outcome may still be unsatisfactory. Examples of problems that have been difficult or impossible to solve with current technologies include preventing fraud and counterfeiting. These issues can have serious domino-effects on public health and the environment, and reduce financial costs of unnecessary recalls of food products. Through the implementation and use of Blockchain to keep track and trace of the entire food supply chain, we have got a secure and trustworthy data storage for all data involved that can be presented to the end consumer. The focus on transparency can potentially grant a competitive advantage towards other companies and guarantee a higher process quality and consumer safety overall.

Tracing and controlling food is possible without the blockchain, however, the implementation of Blockchain technology brings three major benefits to the table:

1. The data cannot be manipulated
2. The supply chain can keep traceability and control secure without all participants disclosing all their customers and suppliers to a central party. The level of privacy to enforce can be decided by the participants in the system/network
3. The blockchain creates trust in low cost IT solutions. You can use email, Word, mobile phones, and still be sure data is accurate. This allows for example rural farmers and independent truck drivers to integrate with the system.

Here at Unibright, we believe that within the food supply chain, three areas of application for Blockchains are feasible:

1. Tracking of food items in the supply chain — Blockchain technology enables the tracking of food packages, or any item to which you can put an unique identifier such as a barcode, QR code, or a RfID transmitter. Compared with current technologies, blockchain can easily regulate who gets access to the information about the products. Integration between regular transaction data and more complex data such as sensor data of temperature and humidity can be directly connected to the product.
2. Tracking of food volumes in the supply chain — Identification of individual grains, beans or bulk commodities often bought on a spot market such as coffea, tea, oils, sugar, and cacao are almost impossible to track. However, with implementation of blockchain it is possible to track the total volumes bought and sold for each participant in the supply chain. The benefit from using blockchain is that no central party needs to be trusted in order to overlook the data, while still allowing volumes to be transparent for everyone in the chain. To exemplify; with the blockchain it is not possible to buy ordinary rice and mix it with a small portion of basmati rice, and sell the entire volume at the higher basmati rice price since the tracked amount of basmati rice going in to the chain cannot be higher than the volume going out.
3. Conditions at the food production facility — Conditions at product sites, like factories, fields, or fishing boats, are today difficult to verify and include labor conditions, environmental conditions, quality control in production etc. Blockchain could be used to make it very difficult to falsify or misrepresent conditions in production. A digital representation of the conditions such as a photo or a digital file can be stored at the production facility, or in a mobile app. A verification of the same files, a digital fingerprint in the form of a hash, is published in a blockchain. Time and location cannot be manipulated since it is recorded in the blockchain where a non-editable timestamp of each entry is required. By making random inspections an inspector can then verify that the photograph corresponds to the actual conditions at the facility, the workforce, and that the outcome/production corresponds to the one reported to the blockchain.

The Unibright framework allows business process specialists to make full use of blockchain potential. For example, the “Batch Tracing” Template defines a basic integration workflow which can be customized visually. All required Smart Contracts for a specific food supply chain blockchain are then generated automatically. Large companies and SMEs usually already hold batch tracing relevant data in their existing IT systems. Unibright simply simply brings business integration to the supply chain, and automatically creates Smart Adapters to connect the smart contracts to the existing system landscape. A batch tracing process is worthless if one does not pay attention to the presentation of the collected data. By relying on the Unibright template, business case specific Smart Queries are created automatically as well. Smart Queries allow to visually monitor the process and all data flowing in a real-time manner, fulfilling business intelligence needs as well as legal demands.

Unibright Framework Overview

Conclusion

Food is a physical product and the connection between the real world and the digital world has to be managed. An area of concern within the food industry, is that many food products are small and inexpensive. There is a risk that tracking of every package and seed can become expensive. Blockchain enables integration of simple hardware and cheap software. The prospect for blockchain solutions within food traceability and control are substantial. However, a major challenge is that the fragmented industry can make blockchain solutions difficult and time-consuming to implement. Using the Unibright framework and the templates it offers, the whole lifecycle of defining, publishing, maintaining and monitoring a business process is supported. The smart contracts needed, get generated automatically and the Smart Adapters allow easy integration of the existing systems. Smart Queries offer a unified way to display all data relevant to the process in one place. We aim to offer affordable and user-friendly solutions for your blockchain implementation.