Scalable Blockchain Framework for a Food Supply Chain

Of late, in a food supply chain (FSC) management, many incidents related to the mislabeling and mishandling of food items are found to occur frequently, which often leaves the customers with a question of how safe and reliable is the food they buy and consume. Since the information regarding the tracking of food items is distributed across different locations widely, and the data is vulnerable to being recorded wrongly, the reliability of tracking of the food items through FSC is suspected. Further, an FSC has various stakeholders that interact and transact continuously. Thus, the scalability issue also plays a vital role in making FSC more efficient. The present-day traceability solutions lack efficiency in terms of scalability and reliability. The scalability can be categorized as throughput, cost, capacity, and response time. In this paper, the proposed method for the traceability solution of a food supply chain (FSC) is based on Blockchain, which plays a vital role in providing transparency and integrity along with other salient features like decentralization, immutability, and verifiability. The proposed FSC is made scalable in terms of throughput and cost using state channeling off-chain algorithm for Blockchain implementation.