Unveiling the Digital Food Product Passport Paradigm for Ensuring Traceability and Safety in the Global Food Ecosystem

Food supply chains are increasingly vulnerable to fraud and inefficiencies that impose substantial economic and environmental burdens. Food fraud is estimated to cost the global industry billions of euros each year while its consequences in terms of public health risks and erosion of consumer trust are equally profound. In response to these challenges, the concept of a digital food product passport has emerged as a transformative solution, capitalizing on well-established technologies that facilitate secure, real-time tracking and immutable documentation of the origin, composition and lifecycle events of a food product. This paper introduces the Digital Food Product Passport, a blockchain-based system that improves global food safety and traceability. It provides exhaustive, immutable records of a product’s development cycle, from origin to packaging, aligning with major policies such as the recent European Green Deal. The Digital Food Product Passport targets to bridge the information gap that currently exists in supply chains and at the same time, empower consumers with reliable data for informed decisions on sustainable choices on food products. Its technical implementation involves several well-established technologies inluding distributed ledger technology, devices enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT), Artifical Intelligence, just to name a few, demonstrating how technology can address complex global challenges.