Blockchain Application for Fish Origin Certification

Seafood traceability is essential in order to ensure the required level of quality control and management. However, over recent years different food scandals have damaged customer trust. Seafood is particularly affected by different types of frauds that take place at global scale. Often complex and unclear supply chains lead to misleading labels. These can falsely allow the selling of low value species as high valuable ones. Labels can also contain wrong location information. For instance, false location can be used in order to sell farmed fish as wild one. The problem of label misleading appears to be widely widespread in restaurants. A study over 23 different countries showed that restaurant mislabelling can be as high as 40%. While in general many traceability solutions have failed to meet the needs of food chain stakeholders, blockchain technology seems to be a promising solution. The decentralised and self-regulating blockchain nature can enable secure traceability in complex supply chains without the need of a centralised trusted party. Traceability data can be stored inside the blockchain which ensures high integrity, reliability and immutability. In this paper we describe a novel fish traceability system (CERTFish) that integrates in a novel way secure digital tags, blockchain technology, IoT tamper proof devices, location and time information. CERTFish ensures wild fish origin authentication and certifies the fish from the catch, throughout its conservation and transportation till the final customers at the restaurant. CERTFish has been validated in a real case study scenarios in order to certify the origin of a special type of anchovies from a specific Mediterranean area.