Using Composable NFTs for Trading and Managing Expensive Packaged Products in the Food Industry

The authenticity, traceability, and management of expensive food products require trusted, secure, and transparent end-to-end data provenance and transactions. In today’s systems, transactions and data related to managing and tracing the origins and history of food products are typically stored in segregated data repositories, and controlled and managed by centralized entities, with no access or visibility to the public or key stakeholders. This increases the risk of data loss, alteration, and tampering. Further it erodes trust among all stakeholders, and weakens consumer sentiment and confidence in the expensive food market, and raises concerns about the verifiability and authenticity of expensive food products. To overcome this problem, this paper addresses the lack of traceability and authenticity problems in expensive food products utilizing blockchain technology and NFTs. NFTs are blockchain-based tokens that can be utilized to represent ownership of unique assets. We propose an NFT-based solution for expensive food products trading management, where the ownership of a food product is maintained by using digital certification, and the trading process is facilitated by smart contracts. We utilize composable NFTs for food products, where interrelated products, such as raw materials, packaged products, and Lots, are represented as top-down and bottom-up composable NFTs in the form of parent-child relationship. Composable NFTs embed extra utility within NFTs, especially when subsets of NFTs are needed. We integrate the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) decentralized storage into our solution to avoid storing large files on the blockchain while maintaining their permanency and immutability. We present various diagrams to show the system elements and the interactions among them. We illustrate algorithms along with the solution implementation details. We evaluate our solution by conducting cost and security analyses. We make our smart contracts code publicly available on GitHub.