There's a link to a cold chain report in CT1's press release issued today. The report presents the use case for shipment monitoring and alludes to why blockchain would be useful.
Press Release
Cold Chain Report (all 77 pages of it)
A few highlights from the report:
1. Temperature is the most significant factor affecting the shelf life of perishable foods, though for some foods humidity is also important. Storing perishable foods consistently within recommended temperature ranges is critical for food safety.
2. There is limited food condition monitoring in the Australian food cold chain.
3.Real time condition monitoring of food from farm through to retailers is expected to become an industry standard within five years.
4.There is poor visibility of product temperatures along the cold chain, which presents difficulties in ensuring food safety compliance and assigning responsibility between the large number of players along the chain for loss/degradation of product quality.
5. Australia’s major grocery retailers... to increase adoption of better quality control systems, such as food condition monitoring systems.
6. Cloud computing is a critical element to make this solution practical as it allows access for all the value chain participants to the same set of condition data.
As I understand it... to guarantee food safety of perishable food travelling from farm to fork all parties in the supply chain need to be aware of temperature (and possibly humidity) information. That's not happening ubiquitously as it should right now (note that the report provides a detailed analysis of why).
Blockchain seems to be a new fancy tech term for providing shared access to records stored on distributed ledgers. Multiple parties can contribute to, and query, records to verify information via the Cloud. CCP captures temperature and humidity and the blockchain is simply the mechanism for securely storing that information for authorized supply chain participants to access.
So I think the equation is:
(LPWAN shipment monitoring x low cost) + blockchain = industry problem solved
The numbers which in the report are staggering. When I was reading the report, I couldn't help thinking that insurance companies might drive adoption. Given the huge amount of insurance claims for food spoilage in transport, I reckon they'll be watching this space.
Apologies for the lengthy post. There's no simple explanation.
When I searched there's just so much information on this subject and related topics.
(20min delay)
