Blockchain in Food Traceability: A Systematic Literature Review

Blockchain technology can be used in the food sector to improve food quality, product recalls, inventory tracking, demand response, traceability, transparency, consumer trust, and mitigating recall costs. Growing interest in Blockchain food traceability technology i.e., to track any food, feed, food-producing animals, or substances used for consumption through all stages of production, processing, and distribution necessitates a systematic literature review. The objective of this systematic literature review (SLR) was to identify the advantages of using Blockchain in food supply chains through studies on Blockchain implementation for food traceability. This study investigated 14 primary recent studies published between 2017 and 2020 from web sources and digital libraries. According to the findings, 21% of papers were published in 2017 and 43% in 2020, indicating that the use of Blockchain technology in food traceability is gaining traction over time. The 14 Blockchain systems studied in this SLR used four different Blockchain platforms: 8 out 14 used Ethereum. Blockchain-based traceability systems provided numerous traceability features, such as complete farm-to-fork traceability, recoding of every single transaction, digital tracking, decentralised file systems, visualisation methods for intuitively displaying risks, and the ability to reconstruct the product's history up to the origin for the purpose of quality verification.