Blockchain for the supply chain of the Italian craft beer sector: tracking and discount coupons

Abstract

In the Italian craft beer market, many breweries and pubs propose a large number of products to beerlovers. In this highly fragmented market, it is hard for the beerlovers to assess the quality of a beer and it is hard for breweries and pubs to inform the beerlover of the quality of their offer. Supply chain tracking is an interesting tool to improve transparency of food markets. However, standard tracking approaches are challenging in highly fragmented contexts for several reasons. In this paper, we show how it is possible to realize a blockchain-based supply chain tracking tailored for the highly fragmented sector of the Italian craft beer. We collaborated with one of the players of that market to analyse the specific problems of that context and we report the results. We show a design that addresses those problems and might be generalized to support tracking in other highly fragmented sectors. We estimate costs and that turn out to be affordable for that sector. Finally, we discuss the adoption of the same blockchain infrastructure to provide a related blockchain-based discount coupon systems, we analyse the advantages of this approach, and we discuss some design aspects to deal with privacy regulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Blockchain
• supply chain
• tracking
• coupon
• blockchain-based

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Lorenzo Cannella, Francesco Goberti, Roberto Marsella, Simone Chilosi, and Simone De Sanctis for the useful discussion and for working to prototypical implementation of the concepts described in the paper. The authors thank Pierapolo Foderà and Domenico Barra (Adamantic) for their useful suggestion about technical aspects. The authors thank Silvia Ciucciovino e Lorenzo Pandolfelli for the useful discussion about legal aspects and privacy regulation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While details depend on the specific design, the coupon owner has to sign a transaction to express his/her will to redeem the coupon and the reseller has to see it to proceed with the selling.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially funded by POR FESR LAZIO 2014–2020, call for ‘Gruppi di ricerca 2020’ Det. n. G04052 of 4 April 2019, under the ‘LazioChain’ project, CUP F85F21001550009 – POR project code A0375E0116. This research was partially funded by Sapienza Ateneo Research grant ‘La disintermediazione della Pubblica Amministrazione: il ruolo della tecnologia blockchain e le sue implicazioni nei processi e nei ruoli della PA.’