# Emerging Perspectives of Blockchains in Food Supply Chain Traceability Based on Patent Analysis
## 1 Introduction  
The food supply chain (FSC)is comprised of all the stages through which food products are delivered to consumers, from agricultural production, through storage, processing, distribution, and further toward food consumption, is a complex system which includes different operators, resources, and processes [1]. Economic performance, as well as the quality and safety of food products delivered to consumers through FSCs, depends on inputs from all FSC stakeholders: farmers, warehouses, processors, logistics, distributors, wholesalers, and many others [2]. With the development of more complex FSCs, tracing and tracking of food from raw materials to the very products delivered to the consumer, with disruptions, fragmentation, poor product traceability, improper product flows, food contamination, and food recall, have become the prevailing issue of FSCs, demanding much effort from all stakeholders, and coming into the focus of both consumers and policymakers [3]. Common to all supply chains is that they could benefit from implementing traceability [4], especially in reverse supply chains when unused, faulty, or damaged products are returned to the manufacturer in an attempt to improve quality [5]. The weakness of all supply chains, including supply chains of pharmaceutical products, courier express, luxury goods, consumer electronics, manufactured goods, automobiles, textile, wood, dangerous goods, andparticularly agri-food products, is that transparent information is not currently offered to the final consumer as part of supply chain management [4]. As a technological concept that evolved from the first cryptocurrency, blockchains (BCs) are increasingly entering into many areas of economics [6]. A BC is a database consisting of encrypted blocks of records in a distributed public ledger of digital events shared among participants of a chain which enables future verification of all executed transactions. It is globally used as a robust tool for supporting financial systems, but its use in other fields of economics is being widely considered, particularly regarding tracking in the supply chains, resulting in its expansion [7; 8; 9]. BC technology facilitates security, privacy [10; 11] transparency, decentralization, and immutability [12], thus enabling trustful, secure, and authenticated systems of logistics and information exchange to be established in supply networks [6]. Insight into the capabilities of blockchain-based traceability solutions come from the academic literature, in which it is pointed out that both tracking and tracing via BC applications contribute to better transparency in supply chains and are thus gaining in popularity, particularly in food and pharmaceutical supply chains. The conclusion, however, is that, in spite of numerous applications reported in the literature, most of them are conceptual in nature, and real implementations of BC-based traceability solutions are very rare [4]. Thus, during the past few years, the application of BC technology in FSCs has come into the focus of numerous researchers. BC technology is proposed as a solution for tracing in FSCs, regarding their safety, immutability, transparency, and scalability [13], with the ability to follow a product along its lifecycle [14], including internal traceability in food processing [15] and enhanced mechanisms for control and response to food recalls in the FSC [16]. [PERSON] et al. [17] emphasize that application of BC technology contributes to FSC digitalization and disintermediation with extended visibility, traceability, and improved data security, while [PERSON] et al. [18] state that blockchain technology may support the identification of unsafe or fake foodstuffs, in order to block further access to them. When proposing a framework for traceability within FSCs and addressing the key challenges for FSC stakeholders, [PERSON] et al. [1] emphasized BCs, in combination with IoT, as technologies of choice for the development of such a system.