Blockchain technology in agri-food value chain management: A synthesis of applications, challenges and future research directions

TLDR: The findings suggest that blockchain technology together with advanced information and communication technology and internet of things have been adopted for the improvement of agri-food value chain management in four main aspects: traceability, information security, manufacturing and sustainable water management.

About: This article is published in Computers in Industry.The article was published on 2019-08-01 and is currently open access. It has received 348 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Value chain & Supply chain management.

Figures

Figure 1, a network consisting of 71 nodes was constructed. It comprises 47 connected components and 24 isolated components.

Table 5 Blockchain technology used for agri-food value chain traceability

Table 3 Detailed information of each cluster

Table 6 Blockchain technology used for agri-food value chain information security

Table 1 Search strings for databases search

Table 7 The identified solutions for the challenges of blockchain technology in agri-food value chain management

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in "Blockchain technology in agri-food value chain management: a synthesis of applications, challenges and future research directions" ?

This paper used systematic literature network analysis to review the state-of-the-art blockchain technology including its recent advances, main applications in agri-food value chain and challenges from a holistic perspective. Based on the critical analysis of literature, research gaps and future research directions are proposed in this paper regarding the applications and challenges of blockchain technology in agri-food value chain management. This study makes contributions to the extant literature in the field of agri-food value chain management by discovering the potential of blockchain technology and its implications for agri-food value chain performance improvements such as food safety, food quality and food traceability. The findings suggest that blockchain technology together with advanced information and communication technology and internet of things have been adopted for the improvement of agri-food value chain management in four main aspects: traceability, information security, manufacturing and sustainable water management. 

Q2. What have the authors stated for future works in "Blockchain technology in agri-food value chain management: a synthesis of applications, challenges and future research directions" ?

The purpose of this section is to highlight the main challenges identified in the literature and propose future research directions for unsolved problems. Therefore, future work should investigate how to appropriate solve the data storage problem without increasing the computational power. Therefore, future work should investigate how to design and evaluate double chain structures for blockchain. This area is open for future researchers to systematically investigate the impact and relative importance of different mechanisms using empirical and analytical tools.