10 Use Cases Of Blockchain To Enhance Food Industry

May 19, 2020 leave a comment

As we all know blockchain is emerging at an accelerated pace, it is revolutionizing many industrial sectors to enhance the overall business growth.

We all would have witnessed the major applications of blockchain in healthcare and financial sectors especially to maintain data security and to create a non-vulnerable, decentralized platform with cryptography techniques. The decentralized technology with cryptography techniques has also been extended to the food industry.

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When it comes to the food industry, the major business operations go through from the supply chain to the trading phase. Blockchain provides real-time solutions for all challenges or bottlenecks springing up in the business operations of the food industry. The most significant goal of the food industry is not to waste the food and make use of the food items effectively.

The grocery giants like Nestle, Starbucks, Carrefour have been trying to implement real-time solutions for food safety with the use of blockchain technology. This makes the suppliers easily identify the bottleneck or the hotspots of food contamination and enables them to pierce the challenges involved in the food supply to the consumers.

Let us see how the blockchain application benefits the food industry. In this article, we will look into the use-cases of blockchain to enhance the food industry.

Before looking at the applications of blockchain. We will look into what is Blockchain?

What Is Blockchain?

Blockchain is a shared digital database or ledger of records with a decentralized platform to record digital transactions in a more reliable and secure way. The blockchain term refers to the blocks of data interconnected with cryptography techniques to form the decentralized platform.

Let us see how this technology will benefit to enhance the growth of the food industry.

The Important Use-cases Of Blockchain Are As Follows:

1. Food Supply Traceability

In traditional methods, tracing the food supply takes more time to accomplish the operation. With the use of blockchain, it takes only seconds to trace the food supply.
Recently, Walmart was able to track the food supply to its source in China within seconds. It was a test run on the blockchain to investigate how fast it can trace the food items to its source.

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Communicating with all the customers and suppliers would take more time without a blockchain. Blockchain revamps this business operation and can speed up the food recalling process by optimizing time & money.

2. Food Quality Control

Since the food supply can be easily tracked with the help of blockchain, it also becomes easy to control the food quality. Effective quality management is still a controversial issue in many retail stores, so to avoid this issue blockchain played a crucial role in implementing effective food quality control.

The digital identities assigned for each product can be stored on the digital ledger, which is difficult to alter. The data stored cannot be manipulated so all the participants of the blockchain can maintain good quality with an optimized privacy level.

3. Transparency In Product Certification

As blockchain is effective in food recall traceability and quality control, the product certifications or the product data stored to provide transparency in the business operations of the food industry.

Since each product will have a digital identity to track the quality and supply, the product labeling or certifications can also be recorded in the blockchain to know the production certifications like USDA organic.

Only an authorized certifying body will be able to view the recorded logs and do the audit process to verify the nutritional fact, product ingredients, etc. Hence it strengthens the quality of the product and the business.

4. Reduction In Food Fraudulent Activities

The transparency and the effective food supply tracking provided by blockchain will enable the detection of the fraudulent activities involved in the business operations of the food industry. The uncontrolled fraudulent activities involved in imitating as fake products are easily identified and measures are taken to reduce such activities.

If the product source is not able to authenticate via blockchain, then the respective transaction will be rejected by the blockchain. This helps in identifying and reducing fraudulent activities.

5. Inventory Management

Inventory management is an important component of food supply chain management. It involves the management of the food stock. With the help of blockchain, the date, and time details involved in shipments and product deliveries can be recorded and tracked in the digital ledger. This will enable us to solve the real-time challenges faced in inventory management.

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This feature of blockchain will be important for the varying medium to small scale food industries, where there is a lack of effective inventory management.

6. Commodity Management

Recently, many companies started implementing blockchain for agricultural commodity management. The commodity management is getting exhausted with the huge data management and in facing the time lags during payments. Blockchain can resolve these real-time challenges of commodity management. The agricultural companies provide the cloud-based services stored on the blockchain.

In the traditional way of commodity management, business deals include third parties between the food companies and the commodity suppliers. Blockchain is implemented to avoid the third intermediaries.

For example, recently, an Israel company implemented its blockchain exchange where there is no intermediary between the suppliers and the traders. This enhances the trading document verification and reduces the document processing time.

7. Effective Payment Solutions

Finding an effective payment solution has been a big-time challenge in food supply chain management. Effective payment solutions play a significant role in enhancing farming and agricultural growth.

Blockchain provides transparency with its immutable database to verify all the transactions. This avoids the unnecessary payment delays associated with the traditional third-party intermediaries involved.

Thus blockchain helps to fasten the financial transaction which in turn improves the overall agricultural growth.

8. Automated Restaurant Management

When low wages were introduced in the restaurant industry, it led to the lack of skilled cooks and which resulted in low food quality. Food poisoning became more common in restaurants when compared to homemade food.

Automated restaurants will face such challenges by implementing advanced AI technology to automate the processes. The meal is prepared by the robots by eliminating human errors or lethargic human activities.

Blockchain could be used to set the smart contracts and fasten the transaction between robots and humans. This automated action can also be triggered by storing real-time data from sensors on the blockchain records.

9. Effective Data Sharing

When investing in agricultural products, the companies would be interested to have complete information on products before making a trade. The product information includes the characteristics and features of the product such as salt or sugar content, the number of calories, the storage conditions, etc.

There are certain blockchains that manage the data-sharing issue by gathering information like data from manual reports, IoT sensors, or other sources involved in the food supply chain.

The immutable digital records the data on its database and based on these data, the companies can optimize the storage and transport services.

10. Fundraising Mechanism

Shortage of funds is always faced by any small scale food industry or food suppliers or farmers. It becomes difficult for them to access funds via traditional methods like loans.

Lack of trust, ownership document, or other issues make them hesitate to acquire bank loans or funds. So it makes them feel comfortable with money lenders, though the interest rate is high.

Blockchain introduces the generation of tokens and fund raising mechanism for the agricultural project. Blockchain enables the real time monitoring of the project and the token investments are allowed. This is the advanced method for financial stability of carrying out the agricultural projects.

Conclusion

This article shows the 10 use cases of blockchain to enhance the food industry. It plays a crucial role from the basic food supply chain management to all the business operations involved in the food industry. This also shows how blockchain helps to accomplish all the challenges involved in running the food industry.

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