Seafood quality, adulteration, and traceability technology integrated with blockchain supply chain

The Fish Supply Chain (FSC) industry faces a significant challenge in efficiently and affordably preserving fish quality and detecting adulteration throughout the chain. Quality, Adulteration and Traceability (QAT) is a multi-mode spectroscopy and AI-based handheld device that is developed by our team to identify fish species and assess fish freshness that can be integrated into the FSC ecosystem. We conducted a survey interviewing professionals across the FSC, including harvesters, processors, distributors, and retailers and queried them about how they evaluate fish freshness and the major issues faced in freshness inspection and fraud detection. We learned that traditional sensory evaluation and electronic noses are the most common methods used for fish quality and freshness assessment. QAT technology will play a role as a substitute for current methods and will offer rapid results for fish species identification, quality assessment, and nutritional content analysis. Blockchain (BC), as a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), can be integrated with FSC to securely monitor and record fish quality and freshness values each step of the FSC. This helps in maintaining product integrity and provides stakeholders with access to the entire journey of the fish product. We extend our experiments to study the degradation of fish freshness throughout the FSC to trigger the system once the rate of decay exceeds a certain limit. These results should be used so BC integration with smart contracts be able to compare its freshness grade to the history of recorded values. If the degradation in freshness exceeds the expected range, then the smart contract should raise an alarm to alert the system. In this way, BC-based FSC incorporating QAT technology is able to detect any degradation and flag products that may have compromised freshness or quality. This integration of technologies not only promises to revolutionize the FSC but also addresses issues like fraud and illegal fishing activities, ultimately delivering higher-quality and more transparent fish products to consumers.