This is one of major outputs of the project – Ms Aida Ismailisufi just defended her Master thesis titled “Blockchain and applications in food supply chain”. The work focuses on Blockchain and practical demonstration based on an open source platform called Multichain. The research considers potential uses in food supply chain, more specifically the use in wine industry for counterfeit prevention.
ABSTRACT –
Digital transformation brings great changes on a daily basis in almost all industries that are manifested in the improvement of business processes as well as in the creation of new innovative business models. The research described in this paper considers the digital transformation in the agricultural industry and the food supply chain. The focus is on Blockchain technology, its capabilities and characteristics, as well as on aspects of the practical implementation of a prototype for monitoring data on food products from the manufacturer to the end user. More specifically, the research consider possibility of using Blockchain technology to create a platform for prevention and detection of counterfeits in food industry. Implementation of the system with the use of Blockchain technology provides for monitoring and secure keeping of the historical data on each instance of the product, in this example wine, thus creating a foundation of a decision support system capable of detecting potential problems and wine counterfeits.
In the first part, the paper presents the basics of digital transformation, Blockchain technologies, advantages, significance and possible applications in the agricultural and food industry. After that, a review of the applied Blockchain systems for the prevention of counterfeiting in the wine industry is given and the practical realization of the prototype based on the MultiChain platform is described. The system has been verified for the main case of using validation and the necessary Blockchain functionalities. Finally, the advantages and possible weaknesses of the system based on this technology were discussed, as well as further directions of system development with the application of mobile applications, the use of QR code and advanced interaction with consumers.
