La blockchain au service de la traçabilité dans la supply chain. Application au secteur de l'agroalimentaire.

Abstract

Nowadays, Regulation about food safety is becoming tighter and clearer because of numerous related scandals within the last decades. Previously, consumers trusted in brands for their quality of food and product without demanding more about them. It is no longer the case as they are requesting more transparency about the product’s origin, production quality and conditions of imported products. To achieve this, companies must take care of being compliant with the Regulation by implementing some tools and systems to ensure traceability of the value chain. The current technology, which disrupts a lot of industries included the supply chain industry, is the blockchain. The core idea of the blockchain is that a distributed and tamper-proof ledger allows all the actors in a value chain to share information about the products. This information will be definitively stored in a trustworthy and immutable ledger.

This thesis aims to analyze the likely utilization of blockchain technology in order to improve the traceability within the agri-food chain. Thanks to a literature search and one-on-one conversations with experts, this research paper outlines the technology’s characteristics and its application within the agri-food chain. On one side, this technology could improve the traceability, thanks to its transparency, its sharing of information, its decrease of the waiting time to find a source of food poisoning and its guarantee that no data has been changed or deleted. On the other side, there are some conditions that need to be met before implementing it, such as the need of digital information computation within the company, collaboration with other actors and data sharing agreements. Moreover, companies should ask themselves if they have weaknesses that could be solved with blockchain.

At the moment, there is not a large-scale case in the supply chain due to the immaturity of the technology.