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Utilizing blockchain technology for providing product insights from-field-to-fork

In the EU, the food and drink industry is the biggest manufacturing sector in terms of jobs and value added. There are around 11 million farms producing agricultural products, and around 300,000 enterprises in the food and drink industry that process these products. The food products are sold through 2.8 million enterprises which deliver food to the EU's 500 million consumers. Together with food processing, food retail and food services, agriculture makes up a sector providing nearly 44 million jobs in the EU. Due to the big diversity in people and enterprises involved in the industry, there is a need to secure information of the products as they move along the path from field to fork.

The SOFIE project aims to provide a solution to this issue by developing a blockchain driven federated IoT business platform. To test the applicability of the platform, four pilots in different fields will be conducted. One of the pilots will deal with the food chain sector and will be carried out in Greece.


The food chain pilot will utilize IoT infrastructure to cover the whole path from-field-to-fork, providing consumers, traders, transporters, and producers with a thorough and secure insight into the complete supply-chain history of agrifood products. Different IoT platforms will be combined in a SOFIE federation allowing information from different path segments to be transparently accessed in a secured and reliable fashion.

Data will mainly be provided by existing IoT platforms, operated by Optimum (Greece) and Synelixis (Greece). Those platforms (Aberon and SynField respectively) are already deployed at customer premises and are both capable of collecting various types of product data (e.g. data of environmental conditions, tracking data, etc.) The aim of this pilot is to show that data from heterogeneous but federated IoT platforms can be shared and combined to provide any involved party a thorough insight into the full history of the product.

The benefits of the SOFIE framework in the Food Chain sector are:

  • Protecting an entity along the food chain path from court cases in case a complaint is filed regarding the condition of a product.
  • Allowing producers to offer more competitive products by providing reliable product information.
  • Providing consumers the ability to verify the entire production and supply chain history associated with a product.
  • Allowing all involved entities along the food chain path to monitor in a reliable and secure way the good state of their products.