Blockchain based solutions for food traceability: a scoping review

The discussion on food traceability has arisen in the last decades in response to growing food safety, authenticity and quality issues (Bai and Gong, 2017). The present study conducts a scoping review of blockchain-based technologies in the food traceability domain. The research evaluates the current state of scientific literature on the topic and identifies the current research gaps through the prism of food traceability drivers. The outcomes of the research show that while the technical solutions for food traceability are becoming more complex and diverse, blockchain research is currently only focused on a relatively limited range of traceability drivers. The food traceability drivers that are less reflected by scholars in the studied literature can become a possible direction for further development of blockchain technologies for food traceability. This paper is one of the first attempts to examine the issues of blockchain technology application for food traceability in the contest of food traceability drivers; it provides a field for discussion on the topic under investigation.