Blockchain technology in agri-food value chain management: A synthesis of applications, challenges and future research directions

By Guoqing Zhao, Shaofeng Liu, Carmen Lopez, Haiyan Lu, Sebastian Elgueta, Huilan Chen, Biljana Mileva-Boshkoska. Computers in industry (Print), 2019

589 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Agri-food value chain is an area of significant importance because of providing sustainable, affordable, safety and sufficient food, feed, fibre and fuel to consumers, it is critical to ensure these value chains running smoothly and successfully by applying advanced internet technologies. Blockchain technology is a new digital technological approach underpinned by the Industry 4.0 to ensuring data integrity and preventing tampering and single point failure through offering fault-tolerance, immutability, trust, transparency and full traceability of the stored transaction records to all agri-food value chain partners. This paper used systematic literature network analysis to review the state-of-the-art blockchain technology including its recent advances, main applications in agri-food value chain and challenges from a holistic perspective. The findings suggest that blockchain technology together with advanced information and communication technology and internet of things have been adopted for the improvement of agri-food value chain management in four main aspects: traceability, information security, manufacturing and sustainable water management. Six challenges have been identified including storage capacity and scalability, privacy leakage, high cost and regulation problem, throughput and latency issue, and lack of skills. Based on the critical analysis of literature, research gaps and future research directions are proposed in this paper regarding the applications and challenges of blockchain technology in agri-food value chain management. This study makes contributions to the extant literature in the field of agri-food value chain management by discovering the potential of blockchain technology and its implications for agri-food value chain performance improvements such as food safety, food quality and food traceability.

Subfields: Food Science, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8c9c68ea1b1212501f213e6401bea072ce7d05cf

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Citations in the corpus

Applying blockchain technology to improve agri-food traceability: A review of development methods, benefits and challenges (2020, background): “However, current food traceability systems are not very effective to build trust mechanisms among participants in traceability chain (Zhao et al., 2019; Helo et al., 2019; Khan et al., 2018) .”
Blockchain for Industry 4.0: A Comprehensive Review (2020, background): “In the blockchain technology, a number of users participate in transaction veriﬁcation and validation [12]–[17].”
A performance measurement system for industry 4.0 enabled smart manufacturing system in SMMEs- A review and empirical investigation (2020, background): “Zhao et al. (2019) suggest the use of advanced ICT and IoT for effective implementation of SMS for improved product traceability and information security.”
Blockchain-based framework for supply chain traceability: A case example of textile and clothing industry (2021, background): “…barrier and drivers (Biswas & Gupta, 2019; Frizzo-Barker et al., 2020; Lohmer & Lasch, 2020; Petersen et al., 2018; Queiroz & Fosso Wamba, 2019; Zhao et al., 2019) and potential application in certain parts or type of supply chain (Fu et al., 2018; Mandolla et al., 2019; Wasim Ahmad et al.,…”
Evaluating the factors that influence blockchain adoption in the freight logistics industry (2020, background): “…that, it provides a permanent transaction records which are grouped into individual blocks and cannot be tampered with; and replaces those traditional paper tracking and manual monitoring systems which prevent the traditional way of doing business, characterize by inaccuracies (Zhao et al, 2019).”