Project Summary

With the introduction of Bitcoin, blockchain got introduced to the world, which is a digital ledger in which all transactions are recorded chronologically and publicly. The key elements of blockchain are Decentralized, Transparency, Open Source, Autonomous, Immutability and Anonymity. Application of blockchain is not just limited to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, LitCoin, etc. and have proved to be useful in tracking ownership, provenance of documents, digital assets, physical assets, voting rights, etc. However, blockchain is slowly becoming popular in the agri-food industry such as using blockchain in the food supply chain. This project is dedicated to designing and implementing blockchain for the benefits of the agri-food industry.

Potential use in non-academic contexts:

The nosh app can directly scan the QR code of the food product which contains the expiry date of the product and automatically records that in the stocked list.

Key Findings:

Abstract: Food safety is an important issue in today’s world. Traditional agri-food production system doesn’t offer easy traceability of the produce at any point of the supply chain, and hence, during a food-borne outbreak, it is very difficult to sift through food production data to track produce and origin of the outbreak. In recent years, blockchain based food production system has resolved this challenge, however, none of the proposed methodologies makes the food production data easily accessible, traceable and verifiable by consumers or producers using mobile/edge devices. In this paper, we propose FoodSQRBlock (Food Safety Quick Response Block), a blockchain technology based framework, which digitizes the food production information, and makes it easily accessible, traceable and verifiable by the consumers and producers by using QR codes. We also propose a large scale integration of FoodSQRBlock in the cloud to show the feasibility and scalability of the framework, and experimental evaluation to prove that.

Abstract: Food waste is an important social and environmental issue that the current society faces, where one third of the total food produced is wasted or lost every year while more than 820 million people around the world do not have access to adequate food. However, as we move towards a decentralized Web 3.0 enabled smart city, we can utilize cutting edge technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and many more to reduce food waste in different phases of the supply chain. In this paper, we propose SmartNoshWaste—a blockchain based multi-layered framework utilizing cloud computing, QR code and reinforcement learning to reduce food waste. We also evaluate SmartNoshWaste on real world food data collected from the nosh app to show the efficacy of the proposed framework and we are able to reduce food waste by 9.46% in comparison to the originally collected food data based on the experimental evaluation.