# Leveraging Blockchain and Consignment Contracts to Optimize Food Supply Chains Under Uncertainty
## 1 Introduction  
Blockchain is a decentralized digital ledger. With blockchain, the supply chain company can document production updates to a single shared ledger, which provides complete data visibility and a single source of truths. Because transactions are always time-stamped and up-to-date, companies can query a product's status and location at any point in time. Blockchain is one of the digital technologies that Industry 4.0 advances with. For both small and large businesses, blockchain can be used to enhance security, privacy, and data openness [1]. Blockchain technology opens up a wide range of options for the manufacturing and supply chain industries. Blockchain is a technology that has attracted a lot of attention and can improve the environment for manufacturing and supply chains. For example, Pfizer, a major pharmaceutical business, is working with other industry participants to put in place a blockchain-based medication tracking and tracing platform ([PERSON] and [PERSON] [2]). This aims to stop counterfeiting, guarantee the safe delivery of essential medications, and improve supply chain efficiency and transparency ([PERSON] et al. [3]). Blockchain technology is often tested by large retail companies to trace the provenance and travel history of food products like mangoes and leafy greens ([PERSON] et al. [4]). This makes it possible for them to locate possible sources of contamination more quickly and effectively, enhancing food safety and lowering the possibility of returns. The benefits of blockchain are now very well understood in a variety of fields. Blockchain contributes to the development of the smart manufacturing era, which will make use of Industry 4.0's modern technology and systems to improve various manufacturing processes and boost profitability as well as efficiency. When developing applications for smart manufacturing, this poses numerous difficulties in terms of security, trust, traceability, and dependability. In 2015, Volkswagen was found to have changed information about emissions in its automobiles, showing the potential for manipulation and lack of trust in the correctness of data in interconnected systems. An E. coli outbreak in romaine lettuce that occurred in 2018 highlighted the difficulty of tracking the source of contamination in intricate, worldwide food supply networks, preventing efficient response to ensure the health of consumers. These events emphasize the necessity of blockchain technology to enhance transparency. As blockchain can play an important role in the food supply chain to increase safety and transparency, modeling to quantify the managerial decisions is essential. The food supply chain can be modeled by newsvendor modeling as fresh food products are mostly perishable, which results in a significantly low shelf life. In operations management and applied economics, the newsvendor model (also known as the single-period newsboy problem) is used to calculate ideal inventory levels. Fixed prices and erratic demand for a perishable good are its main characteristics. In operations management, the newsvendor model is a well-known and beautiful mathematical formulation. These models involve decision-makers who decide how much to buy or order in order to balance the costs of underbuying and overbuying. The newsvendor problem can be seen in a variety of business situations, including purchasing for a single selling season, making a final production run, establishing safety stocks, establishing target inventory levels, and deciding on capacity. Each of these scenarios has the same problem structure: a single policy parameter, such as the order quantity, random demand, and costs associated with unit overage and underage. Managers can be guided by a model that calculates the critical ratio and explicitly defines the costs of overbuying and underbuying. However, apart from adopting blockchain and developing a model for quantification and strategic decision-making, companies should also concentrate on delivery policies and inventory management.