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Top1. Introduction
Over, the growing concern on the environmental challenges conversely food safety is a vital issue of public and social concern across the world. Global rapid climate changes are undeniable (Ahmad et al., 2019). With the continuous growth of Chinese residents' per capita disposable income and the gradual upgrading of food safety awareness, food safety and fresh agricultural products have gradually become hot spots of residents' lives. The fresh food supply chain plays a huge role in ensuring food quality and safety, improving residents' living standards, reducing logistics losses and social resource waste (Dellino et al., 2018). Despite the indication of Covid-19 virus route is only human to human close contact yet doubts of transmission from other medium of aerosol transmission is big question mark among many business sectors especially through food supply chain (Zuber & Brüssow, 2020). Covid-19 virus is traced in many countries in the fresh food logistics (Alpaslan et al., 2020). Therefore, the traceability of fresh food logistics runs through all links of production, processing, transportation, storage, and sales.
The information on the blockchain is open and tamper-free and establishment of a fresh food supply chain system can greatly ensure the safety and accuracy of information, effectively solve the problem of information islands in the circulation of fresh food, and further ensure food safety and improvement Citizens' lives (Yiannas, 2018). COVID-19 has affected the China's fresh food e-commerce market in 2020 (Zhang, Zheng, & Wang, 2021) As a rigid demand industry for people's livelihood, the fresh food retail industry has a trillion-level market size. In recent years, China's fresh food retail market has maintained steady growth. As a result, the scale of China's fresh food retail market exceeded RMB 5 trillion in 2020 (Xiao, 2020). Fresh food products are one of the country's essential consumer goods. With the increase in per capita disposable income and consumer spending, expects predicted that the fresh food retail market will continue to grow in the future; by 2025, China's fresh food retail market will reach 6.8 trillion yuan (Li, Frederick, & Gereffi, 2019) as shown in Figure 1. From fresh food retail channels, offline retail channels such as supermarkets and vegetable markets are the leading fresh food retail channels. At the same time, there are also some problems in developing the frozen fresh food supply chain such as virus or other bacteria presences in the fresh food supply.
The distribution of upstream farmers in China's fresh food production is highly scattered. There are 210 million farmers under ten mu of arable land in China, accounting for 91.3% of the farmers, and the concentration of fresh produce is low. In terms of distributing arable land in China, since the reform are opening up, the right to use land has been owned by individual farmers (Xiao, 2020).
Figure 1.
Retail sales of fresh food in China from 2016 to 2025 (Li, Frederick, & Gereffi, 2019)
Food safety is a vital issue of public and social concern. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19, frozen fresh food has become the hardest hit area for the spread of the COVID-19. In response to the opaque information, lack of trust, and difficulty in traceability in the fresh food supply chain, the article proposes blockchain technology to address the problem.