Blockchain empowered food traceability: the deciding drive for ultimate food safety
Food traceability is the capability to track any food from end to end through all stages of production, process, and allocation together with import and retailing. When food traceability gets the power of blockchain technology, it becomes accurate, unadulterated, and completely encrypted in a way that consumers view the entire supply chain from the harvesting, processing, and transportation up to the store and on the table.
In today’s food supply chain management, traceability is an important component that can bring transparency, reliability, authenticity for its users. Regardless it is about food safety or supply chain protection food traceability works in three phases.
Response: if anything goes wrong in supply chain, traceability enhances the alertness of the food manufacturers, distributors, retailers, etc.
Prevention: Food traceability prevents unauthorized use of pesticides, chemical fertilizer, Mishandling of food additives, Microbiological hazards, biological toxins, etc.
Recovery: During the recovery phase, food traceability allows the industry to maintain or restructure reliance with consumers about the resiliency and safety of the food system.
Food Traceability has become progressively more significant. The global food supply chain today has turned into a network as food manufacturing companies are trying their best to improve their abilities to regain the trust of their consumers as well as to capture the best possible share in food market for business sustenance and development.
The challenges in food supply chain
The global food supply chain today is a wide network dynamic and multifaceted in nature. Major challenging issues are globalization of the food supply chain, evolving industry processes, and consumer inclination for having fresh and simply processed foods. The workflow begins at agriculture, followed by processing of food, storage and allocation. Exiting the network, one can easily find a disharmony of customer trends and altering habits, health drivers as well as new threats, which may include propaganda spread by mass media. Thus, concerns about the safety and quality of food keep on escalating.
Such concerns incorporate the next:
• More food borne disease: random cases of E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, etc. are posing a growing concern especially in developing countries
• Rise in deceptive activities in the food chain products
• Products originated from countries with lower health and safety standards gets included in supply chain easily
• The inflow suffers from higher risk of pollution or spoilage due to extended, multifarious supply chains
The impact of all this is considerable and significant, including:
• financial loss from the negative impacts
• increasing doubt of the food supply and frail consumer trust
• boosted demands for testimony of food product claims
• enhanced demands for directive and strategy from food manufacturers
• augmented business costs to obey regulations
Why food traceability is that vital? The reason really depends on recipients:
• For public safety: it’s all about dropping occurrences of food fraud, as well as accidental or deliberate adulteration, environmental emergencies, and disease management
• For businesses: it’s all about complete risk management and alleviation — reducing the impact of recalling and lowering health liability costs.
• For the supply chain: The level of efficiency gets related to productivity, cash flow step up, innovation, etc.
• For consumers: it’s about entrée to markets about specialty foods and enhancing or escalation of brand confidence.
When food traceability is backed by block-chain technology, it becomes decentralized, 100% transparent, unadulterated, and publicly accessible, which is like empowering consumers to select the best food products for their use based on quality and authenticity.
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