Blockchain technology adoption, architecture, and sustainable agri-food supply chains
Graphical abstract
Introduction
Diversification into high-value agricultural commodities, mostly fruits, and vegetable production, has gained significant policy attention in developing countries (Weinberger and Lumpkin, 2007). The push for diversification is aimed at alleviating farm poverty and meeting the growing demand of consumers for fresh and healthy food as part of their dietary requirements. While food safety is a primary concern for consumer well-being, producers’ participation in the standardized or formalized global supply chains is essential to improve their income and market orientation and reduce uncertainty and risks in the supply of functional foods. Lehmann et al. (2012) advocate the adoption of ethical and sustainable methods for food production and certification using transparent mechanisms to increase the perceived value of consumers for healthy foods and their willingness to pay. However, post-harvest losses of fruits and vegetables at the farm gate, storage points, wholesale and retail markets, and lack of direct marketing platform have posed myriad challenges to the agri-food industries and affected export competitiveness (Balaji and Arshinder, 2016). As ensuring food safety, quality, traceability along with post-harvest management are complex and intricate issues in the agri-food supply chain, food manufacturers have evinced interest to use blockchain with the existing Information and Communication Technology (ICTs) viz. Internet-of-Things (IoT), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), cloud computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (Lehmann et al., 2012).
The literature suggests that the application of blockchain in the agri-food industry can improve process transparency and efficiency, strengthen trustworthiness, remove unnecessary intermediaries from the supply chain, besides enhancing the customers’ confidence for traceable food products (Papa, 2017). Notwithstanding the potential role of blockchain technology integrated ICTs in the agri-food supply chain, there is a significant knowledge gap between the blockchain technology adoption and emerging ICTs available for use. How the actors evaluate the relative importance of different factors for technology adoption or to what extent such factors influence their adoption-intention decision processes are yet to be ascertained. In particular, the existing research elucidates the plausible design and mechanisms of blockchain technology architecture in agri-food supply chain management. Still, it has not paid much attention to supply chain actor preferences for blockchain adoption. The important attributes of the agri-based supply chain and the optimal combination of these limited number of attributes that are most authoritative on supply chain user’s choice or decision making need to be found out. We, thus, intend to contribute to this potential research gap in the literature by investigating determinants or factors of technology adoption and proposing scalable, traceable, trackable, interoperable, and resilient blockchain architecture for sustainable agri-food supply chain practices. While blockchain technology contributes to the economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability (Saberi et al., 2019), it should facilitate to attain an inclusive agri-food supply chain by embracing collaborative networks (Di Vaio and Varriale, 2020), community-based ownership of resources, democratic governance, and decentralized digital technology platform (Scholz, 2016).
In our work, we raise three important research questions with a use case of the grape wine supply chain. It exhibits not only a particular typology of Global Value Chain governance but also espouses an informality and network form of governance (Mishra and Dey, 2018).
RQ1: What are the factors that influence the actors of the grape wine supply chain to adopt blockchain technology, and how these factors can rationalize the information systems architecture?
RQ2: How can the architecture make the supply chain inclusive and augment the value creation support for the actors?
RQ3: How can architecture ensure food quality, food safety, and impact sustainable supply chain practices?
The findings report that dis-intermediation, traceability, price, trust, compliance, and coordination and control are the most significant factors in the given order. In addition, our work estimates the utility value of the different levels of each of these attributes that can influence actors’ adoption-intention decision processes. It is plausible from the review of literature that not much work has been done in integrating blockchain and existing ICTs to create an information system that could cater to the need of the agri-food supply chain actors and their functionalities. Thus, the novelty of our research lies at the design of such an information system architecture by utilizing the application of blockchain integrated ICTs in the agri-food supply chains.
The organization of the paper is as follows: Section 2 presents a literature review; Section 3 explains the conceptual framework, method, and data; Section 4 presents the technology adoption factors; Section 5 elucidates the architecture; Section 6 presents discussion and conclusions.
Section snippets
Literature review
In this section, we conduct a review of the literature on blockchain integrated ICTs adoption and associated architecture in the agri-food supply chains. We aim to identify the potential research gap from this review and for richness and simplicity, we divide the review of literature into two sub-sections. The first one is related to blockchain technology adoption and decision in the selection of technology attributes, their relative importance, relationship, or utility in the supply chain
Methodology
In this section, we discuss the methodology adopted in our work. The overall workflow is depicted in Fig. 1. We first identify the important factors that are relevant to blockchain ICTs-enabled supply chain networks. We then design the survey questionnaire for collecting data from the actors in the grape wine supply chain who understand the importance of technology-enabled supply chains. The methodology section is split into two sub-sections that include a theoretical framework and adopted
Findings
Fig. 3 depicts the relative importance of different factors selected in the pre-testing phase. We find that grape wine supply chain actors perceived that dis-intermediation is the most important factor as this has a relative importance (RI) of 21.16%) followed by the traceability (RI of 20.54%), price (RI of 19.73%) and trust (RI of 17.72%). Compliance and coordination & control have a RI of 12.24% and 8.58%, respectively.
Table 6 presents the part-worth utility of the different levels of the
Proposed architecture
In this section, we propose a management information system architecture based on the findings of the conjoint analysis performed in the previous section. We discuss the proposed architecture in the case of the grape wine supply chain and the corresponding management information systems (GWSMIS). We couple the grape wine supply chain network actors and functions with blockchain integrated ICTs architecture (for more details, refer to Table 9). The GWSMIS is presented in Fig. 5. Each of the
Discussion and conclusions
This study drew some important findings from the analysis of blockchain technology adoption and that helped us to design a modular information system architecture for the grape wine supply chain actors. We raised three specific research questions in this study. First, we explored the critical factors or determinants that influence blockchain technology adoption in the agri-food supply chains. We also investigated the degree of adoption of these factors that would contribute to the selection of
Role of funding source
There is no funding source for this research and there is no potential conflict of interest in publication.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Samant Saurabh: Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Kushankur Dey: Conceptualization, Validation, Resources, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Project administration, Investigation.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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