FRESH-CHAIN BLOCKCHAIN SOLUTION
Fresh food is difficult to preserve, especially because its characteristics can change, and its nutritional value may decrease. Therefore, from the consumer’s point of view, it would be very useful if, when buying fresh fruit or vegetables, they could know where it has been cultivated, when it was harvested and everything that has happened from its harvest until it reached the supermarket shelf. In other words, the consumer would like to have information about the traceability of the fruit or vegetables they intend to buy. This article presents a blockchain-based platform that allows institutions, consumers and business partners to track, back and forward, quality and sustainability information about all types of fresh fruits and vegetables.
Based on the report by Verified Market Research [1], the global market for fresh fruits and vegetables was valued at USD 143,904.80 in 2020 and is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 5.14% from 2021 to 2028, reaching a value of USD 211,073.81 by 2028. Several factors can explain this growth, including the expanding world population, the increasing focus on health and fitness, and the growing demand for organic products, which has led to a rise in the urge for high-quality, natural, nutrient-rich produce. This trend has stimulated the agricultural sector to ramp up its production of fruits and vegetables to meet the ever-increasing demand.
Nowadays, there is a growing awareness among consumers and other players in the food industry about various issues related to food safety, food fraud, the impact of food production on the environment and ecology, and animal welfare. This concern becomes particularly relevant when dealing with fresh produce like fruits and vegetables, which require delicate handling and different processing methods depending on the product. Any misstep in the process can result in contamination and potentially pose a health risk or even be life-threatening. Therefore, it is essential to ensure complete transparency regarding the treatment of fruits and vegetables from the moment of the harvest until they reach their final destination.
It is crucial to emphasize the worldwide significance of this theme, as many authorities have implemented food safety regulations. The European Union was the first authority to pass legislation on food safety in 2002, known as Regulation (EC) Nº. 178/2002 [2]. This regulation requires all food companies operating and importing into Europe to maintain an effective traceability system. The system must keep records that enable the companies to identify the origin and destination of the products they receive and produce, including raw materials and processed products. In the event of contamination, the system must immediately collect the supplied products and alert consumers and the competent authorities. Similar traceability systems requirements can be found in other regions, such as the United States of America (Regulation 21 CFR 820) and Japan (Guidelines for the Introduction of Food Traceability Systems). Some of these laws have been revised and renewed to improve the food safety process, like Regulation (EU) Nº. 2019/1381 [3], which amends the previous one, reinforcing transparency and other relevant aspects. Additionally, ISO 22005:2007 [4] provides the standards for establishing a feed and food traceability system. Despite that, we still witness several instances of foodborne illnesses caused by contaminated products. These include the listeriosis outbreak in South Africa during 2017–2018, which resulted in 1060 infections and 216 fatalities [5], as well as the 2011 E.coli O104:H4 outbreak in Germany caused by contaminated fenugreek, which infected over 3950 people and claimed 53 lives [6]. Additionally, there was a 2011 listeriosis outbreak in the United States due to contaminated cantaloupe [7] and several other outbreaks in the past decade. These incidents highlight the ongoing risk of foodborne illnesses and the need for continued vigilance and improvements in food safety measures.
Achieving a solution for the traceability of food quality characteristics and sustainability indicators requires a “From Farm to Fork” process that can identify the origin of products from harvest until final sale. This process must store various information items at each step of the food value chain, which should be accessible to consumers and all actors in the food industry to ensure the quality, origin, and control of each lot and enable forward and backward traceability, even if they have originated from several lots. Moreover, this process can aid in preventing food fraud, as it would no longer be possible to modify a product’s origin and harvest date, enabling consumers to distinguish the freshest fruits and vegetables and products with lesser environmental impacts. In this article, we aim to design and implement a platform that permits the traceability of fresh and transformed fruits and vegetables and quality and sustainability indicators throughout the entire “From Farm to Fork” process.
The proposed project outlines a novel approach for tracking quality and sustainability throughout the fruit and vegetables value chain by combining blockchain technology and a database. Blockchain technology is a secure and transparent way of recording transactions and keeping track of assets through a shared ledger [8]. The use of this technology, in this work, is explained by its unique ability to provide authenticity, integrity, and immutability to the stored records, thereby reducing food fraud and improving food safety. Due to its decentralized nature and immutability, it provides greater transparency to consumers, enabling them to trust the traced information more, without needing to trust organizations.
The main contributions of this article are as follows:
Analysis of the fruit and vegetables value chain, and building a generic business process model, on which we base the proposed traceability solution.
Review of the related works on traceability in the fruit and vegetables value chain.
Proposition of a distributed and decentralized solution for traceability in the fruit and vegetables value chain.
The proposed solution must be generic and configurable, in the sense that it must not restrict the measurement indicators that are being tracked. On the contrary, the solution must allow the traceability of any metric associated with value chain activities.
The rest of this article is structured as follows: the next section covers the research methodology used in this project. Section 3 presents a background review of the fruit and vegetables traceability platforms and techniques. Section 4 outlines the steps involved in the fruit and vegetables process and shows the generic fruit and vegetables business process. Section 5 covers our proposed solution for the traceability platform, presenting actors, needed data, architecture, and others. Section 6 details the results obtained, and in Section 7, the results obtained are discussed. Finally, Section 8 presents some conclusions and draws lines for future work.
Materials and Methods
For this study, we are employing the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology. DSR is a research approach that aims to produce actionable knowledge about the design of artifacts to address specific problems of organizations, offering them the opportunity to, directly or indirectly, enhance their profits [9]. We are using DSR for the reasons identified in [10], which says that DSR solves problems through novel and innovative solutions or by resolving previously solved problems more efficiently and effectively.
According to [9], DSR is a process composed of the following main research activities:
Problem identification and motivation—it is imperative to provide transparency for end consumers regarding the journey of fruit and vegetables from harvest to their hands. Not only does this foster trust between companies and consumers but it also promotes better practices in food safety.
Definition of the objectives for the solution—the aim is to create a traceability platform for the fruit and vegetables value chain that allows any participant to access lot information instantly by entering the lot ID or scanning the QR Code. The platform will provide end-to-end visibility, enabling actors to track the product’s journey from origin to destination.
Design and implementation—a hybrid solution that combines the strengths of blockchain technology and database methodology will be developed, along with a web and mobile application. The solution will leverage the immutability and security of blockchain for transactional data while utilizing the scalability and efficiency of databases for non-transactional data.
Demonstration—in a highly developed stage, we will provide evidence that the artifacts can resolve the mentioned issues by employing them in a fruit and vegetables traceability simulation system.
Evaluation—the platform under development will undergo various tests, including but not limited to performance and usability evaluations.
Communication—after successfully passing all necessary approval tests, the project outcomes will be presented and published in a scientific journal or conference.
Within this context, a previous paper has been published [11] with a background review of traceability platforms and techniques for the food and vegetables value chain, and presenting the design and architecture of a proposed solution for a traceability platform in that sector. This article extends that previously published paper with more contextualizing information, and with the details of implementing the proposed system based on Hyperledger Fabric blockchain, along with usage examples, tests performed, and a discussion and conclusions about the results obtained.
Fresh Produce Blockchain
Traceability platforms are available for various industries [12], including textiles [13], pharmaceuticals [14], cosmetics [15], and especially the food industry. These platforms can track specific products, such as olive oil [16] or fish [17], or be more generic, tracing local food products from a particular region [18].
In this section, an introduction to blockchain technology is provided, followed by a discussion of blockchain-based approaches to traceability in the fruit and vegetables value chain. In the last subsection, non-blockchain-based approaches to traceability in the fruit and vegetables value chain are also overviewed.
Blockchain Traceability Technology
Blockchain is a type of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). A DLT solution keeps a ledger with records of transactions in a double-entry book. This ledger is shared among the ledger server nodes, making it a distributed ledger [19]. Blockchain is a way to implement a distributed ledger. A blockchain is an open ledger that records the transactions between participants (blockchain nodes) in a permanent and verifiable way [20]. As a record of transactions between nodes, a blockchain may be seen as a distributed database that allows its participants to store and share information kept in the form of blocks in a secure manner [21,22,23,24]. Each block has a reference to the previous block, forming a chain of references. If a block is changed, the chain is broken. This characteristic makes blockchain a very secure way of recording information, allowing every participant to trust that the technology itself will provide security and transparency, with respect to data modification. Every data creation or update will create a transaction in a block that will be kept in the blockchain. Thus, every data creation or updating is traceable.
Blockchains can be classified as follows [13,25]:
Public or permissionless blockchains, where anyone can join and participate without restrictions. Public blockchains are fully decentralized in the way that they are fully governed by consensus algorithms, and no particular node controls the whole or part of a network [26].
Private or permissioned blockchains, where different roles/permissions may be defined to different users, for accessing specific data, and the nodes require adequate permission to join and perform transactions.
Consortium or federated blockchains, where the consensus protocol (mining process) is controlled by a predefined set of nodes. Consortium blockchains are typically used in partially decentralized Business-to-Business (B2B) scenarios, where data can be public or restricted [20].
3.2. Fruit and Vegetables Traceability Using Blockchain Technology
Blockchain has emerged as a highly reliable technology that caters to multiple traceability requirements, which is why several traceability platforms are leveraging it to enhance their operations [12].
The study described in [27] has proposed a blockchain-based traceability system for fruits and vegetables to overcome the existing traceability challenges. The solution employs a “Blockchain + Database” approach with a query platform. The blockchain stores data immutably, and the public data are saved in the database to reduce the burden on the blockchain and to facilitate more efficient queries. Hyperledger Fabric was used to create the blockchain, the smart contracts using the Go language, and the query platform using .Net/C#. The findings indicate that the proposed system resolves some of the current traceability issues, but multi-chain investment is necessary to meet business requirements.
The solution in [28] demonstrates a traceability system for fruits and vegetables based on blockchain technology. The authors analyze the potential impact of this technology on the value chain and conclude that blockchain holds great promise in this field. However, several obstacles may impede its progression. Such barriers include a lack of expert opinion, guidance, strategies, and management structures.
Feng Tian [29] analyzes two categories of agri-food products: fresh produce including fruits and vegetables, and meats such as pork, chicken, and beef. Tian integrates blockchain and Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) technologies in the “From Farm to Fork” process to guarantee product safety and quality. The “From Farm to Fork” process involves a decentralized use of blockchain, granting all relevant parties access to transactional and product information. Additionally, this platform enables comprehensive monitoring and tracking at every stage. After a year, Tian [30] revamps his previous solution using blockchain technology, Internet of Things (IoT) tools, and Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) to maintain the platform’s decentralized nature, offering more robustness and security.
In the publication referenced as [31], the creators present a traceability system designed to implement the “From Farm to Fork” process for urban fruits. This system utilizes blockchain technology and IoT to minimize fraud and poor quality. Furthermore, the creators develop a consensus mechanism and smart contract model for the blockchain.
In their research, Ref. [32] propose a solution for achieving soybean traceability by leveraging the Ethereum blockchain technology. The solution involves Ethereum’s smart contracts and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to help minimize the burden on the blockchain and enable efficient data storage. This approach promises to enhance the overall transparency and security of the soybean supply chain.
In Table 1, a summary of the fruit and vegetables traceability approaches referenced before, using blockchain technology, is presented in the first six lines. The last three lines summarize the non-blockchain-based approaches explained in the next subsection.
Fruit and Vegetables Traceability Using Other Technologies
The authors of the work in [33] have reinvented the business process for the vegetables value chain and developed a computational platform to manage the traceability of the products. The solution utilizes the Event-Driven Process (EPC) methodology with Activity-Based Costing (ABC) to determine and examine the current state of the value chain. The authors employ the Architecture of Integrated Information Systems (ARIS) to create a user-friendly web interface to offer relevant information to the end consumer.
Massimo Conti [34] proposes a system to achieve traceability of fruits and vegetables throughout the value chain using Android smartphones equipped with Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. The “From Farm to Fork” process involves a product identification system that transmits various data to a cloud database via different smartphone applications deployed at different stages of the food chain. The cloud-based database can be accessed by any actor in the process, including end consumers, farmers, and government institutions.
In [35], a machine-to-machine system for tracing apples in a “From Farm to Fork” process is developed and tested in an orchard in Qixia, Shandong Province, China. The solution is integrated and collects information automatically from different operations. It uses an IoT-based hardware system, a smart cloud farming platform, and a mobile application. The system allows consumers to track products using QR Codes. This solution worked for around a year and proved to be effective in achieving traceability across the entire apple value chain.
DNA-based (Deoxyribonucleic Acid-based) traceability is a recent and reliable method to track fruits and vegetables. This technique uses chemical, biochemical, biomolecular, and isotopic techniques to determine the origin of products. We can see successful implementation in the literature for avocados [36], red grapes [37], tomatoes [38], and more.
In [39], the authors propose a novel approach for ensuring the quality of products, specifically olive oil, by combining DNA traceability techniques with other traceability technologies such as Blockchain, IoT, and artificial intelligence (AI). The study demonstrates how this integration can provide a reliable and efficient solution for product quality control. Similarly, [40] examines various current techniques and tools for traceability of fruits and vegetables, highlighting the significance of DNA traceability and traceability 4.0 tools in ensuring product safety and enhancing supply chain transparency.
4. Modeling the Fruit and Vegetables Value Chain
This section provides a detailed analysis of the data used to create our generic business process based on the “From Farm to Fork” approach. To derive the model, we conducted a comprehensive study of various fruit and vegetables business processes to gain insights into the different stages involved in the production process, from harvesting to final sale. We aimed to gain a deep understanding of the entire value chain, identify opportunities for optimization and improvement, and adapt it for any fresh, processed, or derived fruit and vegetables products.
4.1. Fruit and Vegetables Business Processes
We analyzed various fruit and vegetables business processes, both with and without transformations. Our focus was products grown in Portugal, such as Pera Rocha do Oeste, Framboesa do Algarve, and Pêssego da Cova da Beira, as well as in Europe, such as olive oil, tomato, and mushroom. We present examples of business processes for fresh and transformed fruits and vegetables, using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) notation to represent these processes.
4.1.1. Fresh Fruits and Vegetables
We illustrate the business process of “Pera Rocha do Oeste” (Rocha Pear), a fruit cultivated in Portugal, as an example of fresh fruits and vegetables (Figure 1).
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Transformed Fruits and Vegetables
We depict the business process of olive oil, a product obtained from olives cultivated in Europe, as an example of transformed fruits and vegetables (Figure 2).
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Figure 2. Olive oil business process (obtained through the study of [42]).
4.2. “From Farm to Fork” Stages
After analysis of numerous fruit and vegetables business processes and extensive consultations with local farmers and market workers, we determined that the entire process, from harvest to final sale, consists of four distinct stages and two essential activities.
Harvest
The initial stage of our value chain involves harvesting the product, followed by a classification process to determine the ones that meet the criteria for sale. During this stage, it is crucial to store the activity and corresponding measurements of the product.
Post-Harvest
After selecting the products available for sale, they undergo various treatments (e.g., fumigation, bleaching, acid immersion, and biopesticides treatments) to enhance the color and appearance of the product and extend its useful life. After each treatment, there is a new quality assessment. When no more treatments and storage are needed, the products get packaged, creating lots. Finally, these lots are sold and transported to the respective organizations. This stage consists of two parts: “Treatment” and “Packaging,” which are necessary to store the treatments carried out, the measurements that come with them, and the lots created.
Processing
When lots arrive at an organization, they go through a quality evaluation. The lots that pass this evaluation and do not require storage are immediately processed. The primary processing involves sorting, washing, drying, cutting, and packaging. If no storage is necessary, the lots go through secondary processing, which includes drying and osmotic dehydration, to preserve and augment the quality of the products. The products can be further processed to obtain derivatives or by-products such as juices, gelatin, jellies, sweets, syrups, sauces, canned food, alcoholic beverages, vinegar, oils, and more, adding value to the products. After each processing step, a new quality assessment happens, and when no further processing is required, the products are sold and transported to the respective organizations. This stage ends when the organization becomes a distributor. The processes carried out, measurements, and lots created during this step are stored.
Distribution
The final stage involves distributing lots to various locations, including supermarkets, end consumers, retail stores, and food services. It is necessary to store the distribution activity and the associated measurements.
4.2.5. Transport and Storage
The activities in question are recurrent in all of the mentioned stages. Nevertheless, it is essential to draw attention to them, as they play a critical role in ensuring the overall quality of the lots.
4.3. Generic Business Process for the Fruit and Vegetables Value Chain
In summary, we leveraged the data gathered from the individual steps to design a generic business process for the fruit and vegetables value chain based on the “From Farm to Fork” approach (Figure 3).