Blockchain Technology in the Food Supply Chain: Empirical Analysis

Introduction

India is the world’s largest agricultural processor and food ingredient provider in the world. It is the fastest-growing economy among the other countries. The food items move to final consumers in three different stages like starting from farmers in the form of fresh produce, and it will be catered by the manufacturers-to-retailers, and finally reaches the end-user consumers. The goods and materials flow from one stakeholder to another are facilitated by in-house or Third-Party Logistics (3PL) service providers (Pachayappan et al., 2020). Information management is committed by all the stakeholders and their information systems are interconnected seamlessly. This kind of food chain system was enforced in most the developed countries. The food is distributed from the farmer to end-user, customers, and managing the supply chain with different stakeholders is nothing but food supply chain management (Verbeke, 2005). Supply chain management is a broad subject consist of different models. The supply chain management model to be adopted is based on the type of industry, management structure, materials to be handled, type of logistics involved, countries regulation, government policies etc. In layman language Supply chain management is the transfer of materials and services from producers (starting point) to the consumers (endpoint). During this transfer of materials, different intermediaries and stages like procurement, pre-processing, warehousing, staking, assortment, and inventory management, unit operations according to the type of industry, distribution, and record-keeping are performed. Which are the parts of Supply chain management (Swan., 2015). When this chain is considered for a single product at a small scale, the operations are very much manual and can be managed in a simpler manner without much involvement of technology but when it comes to managing a varied product at a large-scale level like corporate organizations level, there is a need for a continuous supply of goods and its constant management for sustainable growth.

Supply chain management is the backbone of any company, without which a company can’t even operate a single unit operation. Too many intermediaries’ involvement is needed for these kinds of large-scale operations. This will lead to the addition of cost, lack of transparency, loss of efficiency, and other human-related problems so there is a need for technology intervention to manage this huge chain of stakeholders for better returns of the company. In this 4^th Industrial revolution technology and operations has to blend in such a way that, every action that is carried has to complete efficiently with proper proof and transparency. Too much human intervention leads to a lack of integrity, lack of proof to work, lack of authenticity, insecurity in ownership, lack of trust. Which should be supplemented through technology. At present industry is using cloud computing technology for example 78% of works are done in an organization with this technology. Which is giving the best results through its information distribution model, but hacking is one of the threats that all governments and corporates are scared of the technology development.

In the present era of the Internet, most of the communication in the industry is happening in a digital mode. This facilitates the industry to reduce their time of operations, cost of operations, and efficiency of operations and so on. Changing technology in the industry might result in a positive impact. At the same time negative impact also. Insecurity in using digital information and digital transactions, the ability of hiding information within the organization, lack of work proof are the best examples of the negative impacts created by Internet technologies and related software’s in the present situation. There are several intermediaries were involved in material transfer in different stages like procurement, pre-processing, warehousing, staking, assortment, inventory management, and unit of operations based on the type of industry (Siddhartha et al.,2021). Whereas in the case of a simple chain, it is considered as a single product their can manual operations and managed in a simpler manner without much involvement of technology and middleman. However, when it comes to large-scale operators especially handling multiple products is considered a difficult task. There is a necessity to continue the good supply and constant management for sustainable growth (Beske et al., 2014).