An Agri-food Supply Chain Trace System Based on RFID & Blockchain Technology

With the vigorous development of China's economy, people's living has been improved rapidly.It changed the consuming habit of the consumer and more and more attention are paid to food safety and quality. However, in recent years, a series of serious food safety accidents occurred one after another, even in Europe there was a “horsemeat scandal” in 2013 (Boyacia et al., 2014. It's worth noting that these kinds of scandals are even more frequent and serious in China, such as “Sudan red”, “clenbuterol”, “Sanlu toxic milk powder” and “trench oil”, which harm people's health and destroy their trust in domestic food markets. Food safety events have broken out frequently in China, which makes consumers to be the vulnerable groups in the markets.

At this point, the production and supply chain is described by way of example solution. First the RFID chip is registered in the supply chain. Subsequently, it is handed over to the manufacturer of food and integrated during the manufacturing of the product. After production, the goods are packaged and fed into the logistics chain. The products are transported to the port, for example, and shipped by a shipping company. From the destination port, the goods are delivered to the wholesaler. The wholesaler distributes the goods to retailers, who sell the products to the end consumer. All of these steps are recorded via the RFID chip and are stored in the Blockchain.

With this log file, the supply chain is fully traceable. The product has a unique ID. In addition, the product is scanned at every production stage or site change, and the data is stored in the Blockchain. This results in a fully traceable product history.For example, the product was made in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and deposited with the unique country ISO (KH-12) in the Blockchain. It then arrived in the province of Koh Kong (KH-9), at which point it was shipped to Hamburg and then ultimately traveled through Berlin (DE-BE) to arrive in Saxony (DE-SN).

A more comprehensive data collection is also possible. It is also possible to add further information, such as status models, free text, transport conditions, and photos as required, for example, for the geoPosition of the data record generation. In this case, the data is stored in JSON format.