Integration of Privacy Protection and Blockchain-Based Food Safety Traceability: Potential and Challenges

Research on safety risk control of prepared foods from the perspective of supply chain

Prepared foods bring great convenience to people's lives, but they also entail safety risks in all aspects, from production to sales. The cooperation of the supply chain and the supervision of the government are key to promoting the safety management of prepared foods. This paper considers the government's regulation, focuses on the interaction relationship between the producer and the retailer of prepared foods, and builds an evolutionary game model to analyze the influence of collaborative decision-making between prepared food producers and retailers in preventing and controlling food safety risks under the government's regulatory strategy. The research finds that: (1) Under certain conditions, there are three stable equilibrium strategies within the prepared foods supply chain: bilateral low-safety inputs, unilateral high-safety inputs, and bilateral high-safety inputs. (2) Government regulators can influence the safety input behaviors of prepared food supply chain enterprises by adjusting investigation probabilities and punishment severity. (3) The safety input behaviors of these enterprises are influenced by various factors, including costs, revenues, brand image, reputation, and the consequences associated with contractual violations. This paper represents the first systematic analysis of prepared food safety from a supply chain perspective. It fills a gap in the existing literature in this area, offering guidance and suggestions for prepared food supply chain enterprises, as well as references and recommendations for government regulators.

The Future of Food

The global food systems face significant challenges driven by population growth, climate change, geopolitical conflicts, crises, and evolving consumer preferences. Intending to address these challenges, optimizing food production, adopting sustainable practices, and developing technological advancements are essential while ensuring the safety and public acceptance of innovations. This review explores the complex aspects of the future of food, encompassing sustainable food production, food security, climate-resilient and digitalized food supply chain, alternative protein sources, food processing, and food technology, the impact of biotechnology, cultural diversity and culinary trends, consumer health and personalized nutrition, and food production within the circular bioeconomy. The article offers a holistic perspective on the evolving food industry characterized by innovation, adaptability, and a shared commitment to global food system resilience. Achieving sustainable, nutritious, and environmentally friendly food production in the future involves comprehensive changes in various aspects of the food supply chain, including innovative farming practices, evolving food processing technologies, and Industry 4.0 applications, as well as approaches that redefine how we consume food.

A Blockchain-Based Traceability Model for Grain and Oil Food Supply Chain

The structure of the grain-and-oil-food-supply chain has the characteristics of complexity, cross-regionality, a long cycle, and numerous participants, making it difficult to maintain the safety of supply. In recent years, some phenomena have emerged in the field of grain procurement and sale, such as topping the new with the old, rotating grains, the pressure of grades and prices, and counterfeit oil food, which have seriously threatened grain-and-oil-food security. Blockchain technology has the advantage of decentralization and non-tampering Therefore, this study analyzes the characteristics of traceability data in the grain-and-oil-food-supply chain, and presents a blockchain-based traceability model for the grain-and-oil-food-supply chain. Firstly, a new method combining blockchain and machine learning is proposed to enhance the authenticity and reliability of blockchain source data by constructing anomalous data-processing models. In addition, a lightweight blockchain-storage method and a data-recovery mechanism are proposed to reduce the pressure on supply-chain-data storage and improve fault tolerance. The results indicate that the average query delay of public data is 0.42 s, the average query delay of private data is 0.88 s, and the average data-recovery delay is 1.2 s. Finally, a blockchain-based grain-and-oil-food-supply-chain traceability system is designed and built using Hyperledger Fabric. Compared with the existing grain-and-oil-food-supply chain, the model constructed achieves multi-source heterogeneous data uploading, lightweight storage, data recovery, and traceability in the supply chain, which are of great significance for ensuring the safety of grain-and-oil food in China.

The Role of Blockchain Technology in Promoting Traceability Systems in Agri-Food Production and Supply Chains

Due to recurring food quality and safety issues, growing segments of consumers, especially in developed markets, and regulators in agri-food supply chains (AFSCs) require a fast and trustworthy system to retrieve necessary information on their food products. With the existing centralized traceability systems used in AFSCs, it is difficult to acquire full traceability information, and there are risks of information loss and data tampering. To address these challenges, research on the application of blockchain technology (BCT) for traceability systems in the agri-food sector is increasing, and startup companies have emerged in recent years. However, there have been only a limited number of reviews on the application of BCT in the agriculture sector, especially those that focus on the BCT-based traceability of agricultural goods. To bridge this knowledge gap, we reviewed 78 studies that integrated BCT into traceability systems in AFSCs and additional relevant papers, mapping out the main types of food traceability information. The findings indicated that the existing BCT-based traceability systems focus more on fruit and vegetables, meat, dairy, and milk. A BCT-based traceability system enables one to develop and implement a decentralized, immutable, transparent, and reliable system in which process automation facilitates the monitoring of real-time data and decision-making activities. We also mapped out the main traceability information, key information providers, and challenges and benefits of the BCT-based traceability systems in AFSCs. These helped to design, develop, and implement BCT-based traceability systems, which, in turn, will contribute to the transition to smart AFSC systems. This study comprehensively illustrated that implementing BCT-based traceability systems also has important, positive implications for improving AFSC management, e.g., reductions in food loss and food recall incidents and the achievement of the United Nations SDGs (1, 3, 5, 9, 12). This will contribute to existing knowledge and be useful for academicians, managers, and practitioners in AFSCs, as well as policymakers.

Trusted-auditing chain: A security blockchain prototype used in agriculture traceability

Traceability systems have changed the way food safety is managed and data is stored. Blockchain tracking services now provide customers with an infrastructure that allows them to easily access data online. However, there are limitations to these new capabilities, such as a lack of transparency and the existence of privacy and security challenges. Additionally, as the need for more agile, private, and traceability secure data solutions continues to grow exponentially, rethinking the current structure of blockchain agricultural traceability is mission-critical for a country. By leveraging and building upon blockchain's unique attributes, including tamper-evident, security hash crypto-data, and distributed ledger, we have proposed a prototype that allows traceability data to be reliably stored via blockchain while simultaneously being secured, with completeness auditing to enhance credibility. The result, the trusted auditing chain (TA chain), is a flexible solution that assures data security and solves challenges such as scalability and privacy-preserving. The TA chain works through Schnorr-style non-interactive Zero-knowledge proof to support security automatical choose privacy augmented. In addition, The TA chain can audit more than 1000 transactions within 1ms, and its error stabilizes below the 250 μs, which proves a security and fair traceability system to assure that data is distributed and reliably, and provably audited.