Enhancing sustainability in dairy industry: Blockchain-based waste reduction

In recent years, the global demand for dairy products has reached unprecedented levels in the food and beverage market. Despite being produced in large quantities to meet daily needs, high organic content in milk causes it to expire quickly, leading to food waste. Current dairy supply chain management systems lack traceability, auditability, and trust relationships, contributing to the problem. To address this issue, we propose a private Ethereum blockchain-based solution that holds all participants accountable and assesses their actions in a decentralized, auditable, traceable, secure, private, and trustworthy manner. Our system consists of various phases managed by four smart contracts that ensure all involved parties are accountable. We use an events-based approach to ensure traceability and data provenance, where all actions are stored on an immutable ledger in the form of events. By providing a transparent and traceable system, it encourages responsible resource utilization and supports a more sustainable approach to dairy production. We present the system architecture, sequence diagrams, entity-relationship diagrams, and algorithms to explain the working principles of our solution. We also validate the effectiveness of our developed smart contracts and make our smart contract code publicly available on GitHub.