Optimizing agricultural food supply chains using permissioned blockchain for traceability and consumer trust

Traceability, counterfeit data, and trust in food supply chains remain problems in agricultural food supply chains. Existing systems rely on isolated record-keeping and centralized databases, which are susceptible to manipulation, slow data updates, and a lack of transparency across the entire supply chain. Past research has developed blockchain technology to address these problems, but it still faces challenges in scalability, permission control, and end-consumer verification. This research proposes a permissioned blockchain-based traceability system to improve the agricultural food supply chain and trustworthiness. The framework uses Hyperledger Fabric, smart contracts, and Quick Response (QR) code consumer verification to record events securely, to perform automatic verification, and to provide details of batch history. The approach involves data extraction from real-world demand datasets, data preprocessing, creation of simulated traceability events, development of blockchain ledger structure, development of smart contract rules, and QR-based verification. Results from experiments show enhanced traceability, verification speed, throughput, and consumer verification rate over the existing system. The system is built based on Hyperledger Fabric, Docker, Node.js, and Python for modularity and scalability.