The platform leverages the blockchain’s immutability, transparency, smart contracts, and consensus algorithms, to make it ideal for food safety traceability systems.
Concerns about food safety have grown across society in recent years. Building a trustworthy traceability system is essential for effectively identifying and preventing food safety issues and tracing the responsible parties. The entire food supply chain, which includes production, processing, warehousing, transportation, and sale stages, must be precisely recorded, shared, and traced. Traditional traceability systems suffer from problems like data invisibility, tampering, and the leakage of sensitive information. This paper proposes an open platform for a food safety traceability system that indefinitely and incessantly stores and records all transactions, events, and activities on the blockchain’s immutable ledger linked with IPFS - a peer-to-peer decentralised file system - for storing and providing maximum transparency and traceability. The platform leverages the blockchain’s immutability, transparency, smart contracts, and consensus algorithms, to make it ideal for food safety traceability systems. But more importantly, it mirrors the food supply chain, making it a pluggable toolbox for all stakeholders across the chain to adapt to their system irrespective of the food products they deal with since it is a multi-asset system. It could even be adapted for non-food products with a supply chain similar to the typical food supply chain. Simulation results show the complete success of our platform's blockchain transactions with real-time responsiveness.
Keywords: food safety, traceability, open platform, blockchain, smart contract.
Citation: E. T. Tchao, E. M. Gyabeng, A. Tang, J. B. N. Benyin, E. Keelson and J. J. Kponyo, "An Open and Fully Decentralised Platform for Safe Food Traceability," 2022 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI), Las Vegas, NV, USA, 2022, pp. 487-493, https://doi.org/10.1109/CSCI58124.2022.00092
