Blockchain technology for the seafood cold supply chain: lessons from Samsung SDS

A blockchain technology (BT) has been at the forefront of the latest fourth industrial revolution due to its breakthrough ideas and concepts defying conventional wisdom. The BT is known to bring various potential benefits including safe record keeping, contract fraud detection, asset tracking, secure information processing, and enhanced supply chain visibility. Despite these benefit potentials, the full utilisation of BT for real-world practices has been rarely reported in the literature. To develop specific BT implementation guidelines and create the best-case BT practice, this paper undertook qualitative analysis drawn from the structured observation of a processed seafood company that leveraged BT as an enabler of supply chain visibility. This paper also constructs the BT architecture and reports its implementation outcomes based on the real-world case study. Through this case study, we found that BT enabled the processed seafood company to track every shipment after authenticating its origin and destination. As a result, the enhanced product tracing capability allowed the processed seafood company to identify the potential sources of seafood contamination, poisoning, or spoilage problems thanks to safe record keeping, seafood tracking, secure information processing, and enhanced supply chain visibility.