An Open and Fully Decentralised Platform for Safe Food Traceability

Abstract

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 as well as tracing the responsible parties. The entire food supply chain, which includes the stages of production, processing, warehousing, transportation, and sale, 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 characteristics such as 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 food chain to adapt to their system irrespective of the food products they deal with since it is a multi-asset system as well. It could be even adapted for non-food products that have a supply chain similar to the typical food supply chain. Simulation results show that there is complete success of all the blockchain transactions on our platform with real-time responsiveness.