One of consumers' primary concerns is verifying the traceability of sensitive foods, such as olive oil. Henceforth, recently, ensuring that olive oil supply chain is reliable and safe has become highly required. The current state of this supply chain involves a variety of stakeholders with diferent interests, often reticent to share traceability information. In this paper, we present BOOSCh, a fully decentralized olive oil traceability solution built on Ethereum blockchain. Compared to the existing approaches, the proposed work uses both the secure InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) for of-chain data storage, and smart contracts to manage interactions among stakeholders, insuring transparency and eficiency Through this combination, BOOSCh eliminates intermediaries, ensuring an immutable and trusted transaction history. We provide implementation details of the approach to show its efectiveness, ofering a template for improving supply chain processes in other industries.
The future of agriculture depends critically on the capacity to trace food. A food traceability system is required to retrieve any or all of the information relating to the product under examination, throughout its life cycle. Any traceable food or product in the supply chain is referred to as a Traceable Resource Unit (TRU), which is the object under investigation. The two goals of traceability are to track the transaction history and the TRU’s current location.
Consequently, the food traceability system should guarantee food safety and quality control, permit authentication, prevent fraud, and be under the authority’s control. It should also increase customer safety and confidence. One of the most important agricultural activities that requires an eficient track-and-trace system is olive oil production because of its potential health benefits, its delicious taste, and its nutritional and culinary advantages over other edible oils. Thus, it can be a target for fraud and adulteration during its transformation process due to its high prices and low production volume.
Many Mediterranean countries, Tunisia foremost among them, rely heavily on such industries
to contribute to their socio-economic development. In fact, growing olives in Tunisia is one
of the main activities in agriculture, and it is considered a strategic sector. Indeed, Tunisia is
considered the most olive-growing nation in the southern Mediterranean, which is also the
third-largest exporter of olive oil in the world (after Spain and Italy) and the fourth-largest
producer of olive oil globally (172,000 t/year) [
Traditional systems to handle the olive oil supply chain are complex and dificult to manage
due to the involvement of several stakeholders [
In order to make olive oil supply chain secure, traceable and eficient, various recent eforts
in the literature make use of the blockchain technology due to its numerous applications,
particularly in supply chains and logistics, such as [
To overcome such limitations and to improve olive oil traceability, we present in this paper BOOSCh, the Blockchain-based Olive Oil Supply Chain, using the Ethereum platform. The local blockchain Ganache, Trufle IDE, web3js, and JSON-RPC features of the Ethereum blockchain are employed in this study. Smart contracts are developed using the Solidity programming language, which ensures the security of data provenance and the immutability of all stakeholder interactions. In addition, an of-chain InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) storage is adopted to store confidential data. As the only information maintained on-chain is the IPFS hash, this prevents sensitive information from ever being disclosed to anyone browsing the blockchain.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses a critical review of existing eforts with respect to the traceability of food supply chain, particularly to the olive oil case study. This is followed by a description of the olive oil supply chain in Section 3 and key concepts about Blockchain and its benefits in Section 4. Section 5 highlights the proposed Blockchain-based Olive Oil Supply Chain, followed by its implementation details in section 6. Section 7 concludes the paper, summarizing contributions and highlighting possible improvements for future work.
To ensure the ultimate consumer’s health and safety and to avoid fraudulent behaviour, several
research works on integrating blockchain technology to ensure food traceability have been
proposed in literature [
The study in [
Among them, we cited the study in [
The work in [
[
via a wireless sensor network. Collected data from sensors such as temperature, humidity and
luminosity were saved on a real time database. To track-and-trace the diferent transactions,
the blockchain technology is used with the aim of securing data which are encrypted using the
Keccak 256 algorithm and cannot be accessed only by using the public key of the sender and
the private key of the receiver. The final prototype was based on Ethereum Blockchain and
was embedded on a Raspberry Pi 4 platform. Similar contributions were made by authors in
[
Another interesting work in [12] provided a general solution that facilitates the implementation of supply chain management systems and it illustrated its feasibility by the use of olive oil supply chain as case study. The idea here was to use Domain-Specific Graphical Language to represent supply chains. A simple graphical interface for making such representations, and a set of tools for translating the obtained graphical models into solidity smart contracts were ofered by the proposed *-Chain Platform. However, the major issue with this platform is that its use is almost dificult for inexperienced administrators and the generated solidity code lacks validation. 3. Theoretical aspects about the olive oil supply chain Traceability systems are used today to ensure the quality and safety of many diferent types of food items, including milk, fruit, vegetables, and meat. In this study, we concentrate on the analysis of extra-virgin olive oil traceability systems. According to [13], Extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO), virgin olive oil, regular virgin olive oil, and lampante virgin olive oil are the four categories of virgin olive oil. Due to its exceptional health benefits and organoleptic qualities, extra-virgin olive oil is regarded as the oil of the highest quality and price. Therefore, consumers are increasingly demanding authentic and high-quality olive oil and full transparency of its supply chain process.
The olive oil supply chain includes several stakeholders and several activities are carried out by each one of them as specified below : • Farmer: He is in charge of farm management. He provides data about the ownership of the land plot, planting olive trees, cultivating and harvesting olives. The main factors that are collected by the farmer are the weather conditions (i.e., humidity, temperature, air pollution, etc.), the chemical composition of the land, and the harvesting method (i.e., by hand or by machines). • Manufacturer: He is responsible for the transformation process of olives into olive oil.
Moreover, he is charged with the packaging process and labelling details of every batch of product, etc. • Inspector: Called also a certification entity, he takes samples of extra virgin olive oil to test organoleptic and chemical properties (i.e., acidity, fatty acid and sterol composition). Then, he generates a digital certificate proving that the olive oil under inspection is an Extra Virgin Olive Oil. • Distributor: also called a logistic supplier, he is charged with the transportation method used, and real-time data recorded about humidity, temperature, and other environmental conditions that may afect olive oil quality during the transportation period. • Retailer: Data about the current stock of olive oil bottles, storage details, expiry date, and period at the market up to the consumer’s purchase is provided by the retailers. • End Consumer: he scans the QR code printed on the olive oil bottle to get all the information about this product from farm to store and get an idea about the safety and quality of this olive oil. 4. Key concepts on blockchain and its benefits Blockchain was introduced for the first time by Nakamato et al. [ 14] as the technology underlying Bitcoin3. It is a decentralized and distributed ledger based on a peer-to-peer network. It is also considered a complex data structure that manages the flow of data without requiring central authority. The internal structure of a blockchain is composed of a linked list of blocks. Each block is linked to the previous one through the use of cryptographic hashes. It contains secure transactions signed with digital signatures and validated by several peers in the network according to a consensus protocol.
One of the most important features that has been proposed by several blockchain platforms
is the Smart Contract (SC). Indeed, SC is a software program that was designed to develop
business logic in order to make Blokchain suitable for several domains, either the financial one,
especially eHealth [16] and supply chain management[
As mentioned in [15] and shown in Figure 1, the use of Blockchain technology in the context of food supply chain management presents several advantages. Firstly, food authentication, which is the compliance of foods with their label descriptions (e.g., geographic origin, production method, technology used in processing, composition, etc.) is guaranteed by Blockchain technology since all information and data are recorded in the immutable ledger. Second, due to the transparency feature of blockchain, there is no need to worry about food fraud. Any change made is visible to everyone in the network. Also, food safety and security are achieved because Blockchain transaction records are exceedingly hard to attack since they are encrypted. Furthermore, since every entry on the distributed ledger is connected to the previous one and so on, hackers would need to change the entire chain to change any record. 5. Development of Blockchain-based Olive Oil Supply Chain The proposed Blockchain-based Olive oil Supply Chain (BOOSCh) is highlighted in Figure 2. The stakeholders that are involved in this work are: Farmer, Manufacturer, Inspector, Consumer. 3The first application of Blockchain that allows nodes to transfer digital currency without the need of a trusted third party like a central bank.
All their interactions with the developed smart contracts generate transactions stored on the blockchain. Each actor has a unique Ethereum address and has specific privileges to connect to the Dapp solution and perform its tasks. We use modifiers in the functions of the smart contract to apply restrictions to the unauthorized participants.
s e iii t v t c A s r o t c A n i a h k c o l B
Agriculture area Olive varieties Enviornment conditions
Date Quantity
Milling Date information Containers
manufacturer
Figure 3 depicts interactions between various supply chain actors within the proposed system, and may be loosely separated into five phases that are described below.
Harvesting olives: The farmer initiates the process of the olive oil supply chain by adding a new record in the blockchain about the olive harvest at the suitable time. He provides harvest information such as the harvested land plot, location, variety, the time period required for the harvesting process and the weight of olives. Moreover, the harvesting technique (i.e., by hand or by machines) must be recorded because it may afect the acidity of the olives and, as a result, the quality of the extra virgin olive oil.
Milling olives: The manufacturer receives a notification when a given olive harvest is added
to the system. Note that for simplicity reasons, the olive transportation from the farm to the
olive factory is actually done by the farmer itself. The milling process starts and follows several
tasks: de-leafing, washing, crushing, malaxing, decanting, and separation [
Inspecting olive oil: Once the inspector receives the certification request from the manufacturer, he starts the inspection and certification process. Its primary contribution consists of validating and documenting the final olive oil’s specified qualities and characteristics using specific sample analysis. He conducts chemical-physical studies (involving acidity, peroxides, etc.) and organoleptic assessment by a test panel. The output of this phase is a digital certificate proving the compliance or not of the obtained oil with extra virgin olive oil, which is stored on the IPFS system. The obtained hash is then forwarded to the smart contract and recorded on the blockchain.
Packaging olive oil: Once the manufacturer receives the digital certificate of the olive oil under examination, he can proceed with the packaging and bottling activities. By adding an intelligent label with a QR Code to each oil bottle, the main objective is to enhance the food tracking process and to avoid fraud and ensure authenticity. The QR Code label adds value to the oil bottle by enabling the consumer to confirm the accuracy of the data on the label and defend the product’s pricing. It summarizes all relevant information to this olive oil such as the land plot location, harvesting date, milling date, the oil quality certificate, the packaging date, etc. Once this step is completed, olive oil bottles are delivered to retailers and then to the market.
Consuming/Buying olive oil: The end consumer may verify the authenticity and quality of extra virgin olive oil by scanning the QR code attached to the oil bottle. Consequently, the use of QR code may increase the consumer’s trust and is also useful to manage olive oil quality and safety from farm to market.
It is worthy to note that IoT smart devices and sensors to collect farm data (e.g., soil, water, temperature, and humidity) are not included in this current work. In the cultivation phase, the farmer provides manually collected data about land plots, olive tree varieties, fertilizing, and pesticides. A new transaction can be started when the farmer proceeds with olive cultivation and new records are created in the blockchain. Moreover, temperature monitoring is highly required either during the milling process or transportation process, therefore, temperature sensors should be deployed on the box containing the olives at the end of the harvest or on the olive factory especially on oil containers. Actually, this information is collected manually, and the use of temperature sensors is also out the scope of this paper.
The proposed solution is developed using a public Blockchain called Ethereum. To implement, deploy and test our solidity smart contracts, we use the trufle 4 Framework, which is a very familiar tool for Blockchain developers to create a smart contract project. It ofers a project structure, files and folders that make easy the deployment and testing of Ethereum smart contracts.
Figure 4 presents the architecture of the olive oil Dapp which is made up of three layers. The front-end layer is implemented using the React5 Framework, and each actor connects to the Dapp using the Metamask6 wallet. The business layer is implemented in NodeJs and is composed of two kinds of APIs (Application Programming Interface). First, an API for blockchain access
Presentation Layer
Business Logic Layer
API for Service Layer (NodeJS) API for Blockchain Access
Data Layer Distributed Ledger
Smart contracts
Database storage System Centralized Decentralized mongodb IPFS is responsible for invoking smart contracts deployed on the Ganache7 local blockchain. The library web3.js8 is adopted to perform actions like reading and writing data from smart contracts. Second, an API for data access is provided to manage data access and of-chain storage. Due to performance and compliance reasons, centralized (i.e., MongoDB) and decentralized (i.e., IPFS) database storage systems are used in the data layer. For example, olive oil certification details are stored of-chain, and the IPFS-hash of the generated document is stored on-chain.
Figure 5 illustrates the GUI interface used by the farmer to provide details about the harvesting activity. Also, the GUI interface of the inspector profile is depicted in Figure 6.
In this work, we have investigated the challenge of food traceability within the olive oil supply chain. To address this issue, we developed a decentralized solution based on blockchain technology, called BOOSCh. The latter is built on Ethereum blockchain and makes use of several promising techniques: smart contracts to easily manage interactions among stakeholders, IPFS for the of-chain storage and QR code to get detailed information regarding the olive oil’s path to the store. Through BOOSCh, the traceability, security and scalability of the olive oil supply chain is achieved. Moreover, we demonstrated that the olive oil supply chain management becomes more practical and cost-efective. At the end, we provided the high level architecture of BOOSCh and its implementation details in order to show its efectiveness.
Although the functions in the developed smart contract were implemented for the olive oil supply chain, they can be easily extended to other supply chains like the drug supply chain and the seafood supply chain. Moreover, we think that further research and development are needed in order to apply Blockchain and IoT devices in supply chain. For instance, we can investigate
the deployment of IoT sensors to collect real time data about temperature, humidity, etc. These sensors can be placed at the boxes containing the olives at the end of the harvest activity, at the oil container at the end of milling procedure or at courier trucks used for transportation. Despite the several advantages of blockchain technology, its development is still challenging and requires verification and validation eforts to obtain eficient, safe and secure blockchain-based solutions.
Thanks to the student Engineers Ibrahim Ben Lakhal and Abir Grati and Mohamed Ben Salah for the development of the olive oil Dapp solution in the context of their Second Final Year Project. based framework for certifying extra virgin olive oil supply chain, in: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing (SMARTCOMP), 2019, pp. 173–179. doi:10.1109/SMARTCOMP.2019.00049. [12] S. Bistarelli, F. Faloci, P. Mori, C. Taticchi, Olive oil as case study for the *-chain platform, in: M. Pizzonia, A. Vitaletti (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Distributed Ledger Technology co-located with the Italian Conference on Cybersecurity 2022 (ITASEC 2022), Rome, Italy, June 20, 2022, volume 3166 of CEUR Workshop Proceedings, CEUR-WS.org, 2022, pp. 94–102. [13] R. A. Diego Luis García González*, R. Aparicio-Ruiz, Food Integrity Handbook: A Guide
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