Framework to Improve the Traceability of the Coffee Production Chain in Perú by Applying a Blockchain Architecture

Abstract

The value of coffee is decreasing in the international market caused by the poor traceability that coffee cooperatives offer to the rest of the public in the production chain. There are paper records or storage in centralized databases of the details of the product that is delivered and received at each stage, generating high cost and inefficiency in paper-based processes, fraud, corruption and errors in both processes. Other investigations pose the problem proposing solutions with opportunities to improve. A framework is proposed to improve the traceability of the coffee production chain using blockchain. The proposed framework is composed of 3 phases: (1) Blockchain architecture design, (2) Smart contracts design and (3) Web application design. Blockchain technology is used to guarantee immutable traceability of the production chain. The proposed framework was validated in a coffee cooperative located in Cajamarca (Peru) applying 2 experiments and a survey based on expert opinion. The results show that with the proposed framework, time of process and the number of errors can be reduced in the defined scenarios, where in turn a reduction of 99.87% of the time in the generation of coffee traceability is evidenced. In addition, the results of the survey show that the “performance”, “traceability parameters” and “usability” of the system have an average value of 4.6 (Value close to 5).