Transforming The Way Your Food Supply Chain Is Securely Shared With The World.
Ever wondered the process on how your meal landed on to the table, fresh and desirable to consume. Blockchain is making a positive impact on the food ecosystem, making a major breakthrough in the food industry. Creating a shared distributed ledger of transactions over a decentralised peer-to-peer network. Shaping the way consumers get to know about how their food landed on the table.
What is Blockchain?
Devised originally for the digital currency bitcoin. Information contained in a blockchain consists of a shared and continually reconcilable data. Providing an open decentralised database of every transaction involving value., these transactions will be recorded in a public and distributed ledger, therefore any fraud can be significantly reduced.
How Blockchain Works?
The data stored in the blocks are represented using a value and these blocks have the ability to store a value of money, certification of ownership, vote during an election, etc. These stored values are encrypted and it contains the senders and receivers encrypted identifiers as well. Each of these blocks contains a hash and this hash is generated through a mathematical function, which makes each hash unique (ex: Hash- 639EFCDo8ABB237DFo2E99DC).
Each of these blocks is linked together using these hashes, as each of these hashes contains the hash of the previous block. In case anyone tampers the data in a single block, the hash of that block changes making the whole chain invalid to use. Therefore, to mitigate the attempt made on tampering with the data a hash is used. However, a hash alone is not enough, therefore blockchain technology has used a process called proof of work along with it.
Blockchain Integration with Supply Chain
Blockchain being immutable, lets no one tamper the data with. Consumers are more likely to switch to food products which are more organic and therefore, in order for consumers to identify authentic food suppliers blockchain can be integrated to make organic food suppliers transparent.
People these days are becoming more health-conscious the integration of blockchain is going to be much more beneficial. Being a distributed ledger by design it has managed to solve the issue of trust in the food industry. Protection against food contamination and food-related outbreaks is needed to be looked into and has become a worldwide issue. Food transmitted disease is a concern and these outbreaks can further destroy the companies reputation.
Consumers have the ability to trace the source in seconds. Initially developed as a part of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, now we see how it is integrated with the food supply chain. The main reason for traceability is to maintain trust between the suppliers and the consumers. Due to traceability, any food scandals that occur can be reduced as it makes it easier to track down the main reason for it.
Recent studies show the number of outbreaks which have occurred due to fraud caused by suppliers. The discovery of horsemeat in a beef lasagna sold by a European frozen food conglomerate has made it widespread for consumers to do a thorough search on where their food comes from. By tracking this down it has been said that after a thorough search through Britain’s food safety regulator has found evidence that the slaughterhouse and the meat processing firm sold horse meat labelled as beef.
However, the process of tracking food from the farm to the table is quite complex and the biggest challenge of integrating blockchain is how much confidential data will suppliers be willing to share.
Making it a go-to solution for consumers to know about their product and for businesses to strengthen their position in the global market, blockchain technology will be a crucial part in people’s lives in upcoming years.
