Why blockchains could solve food safety puzzle

Food supply chains were vulnerable long before the coronavirus pandemic. Recent scandals have ranged from modern slavery in Vietnamese fisheries to the persistent problem of child labour in the cocoa industry. Perhaps the most well known fraud was the UK’s horsemeat scandal of 2013, where up to 60 per cent of products labelled as beef were actually horse.

UK supermarkets have also been found selling contaminated chicken on numerous occasions, while a longstanding issue of romaine lettuce in the US causing E coli only recently ended. Such scandals have made the public much more interested in the food supply chain, not to mention the impact of food production on the environment.