key: cord-0769182-7lr4hoj9 authors: Qian, Jianping; Yu, Qiangyi; Jiang, Li; Yang, Han; Wu, Wenbin title: Food cold chain management improvement: A conjoint analysis on COVID-19 and food cold chain systems date: 2022-03-02 journal: Food Control DOI: 10.1016/j.foodcont.2022.108940 sha: 3df5f032645135371542eb9bc75f4ce4a426eb69 doc_id: 769182 cord_uid: 7lr4hoj9 Cold chains are effective in maintaining food quality and reducing food losses, especially for long-distance international food commerce. Several recent reports have demonstrated that frozen foods are serving as carriers of SARS-CoV-2 and transmitting the virus from one place to another without any human-to-human contact. This finding highlights significant difficulties facing efforts to control the spread of COVID-19 and reveal a transmission mechanism that may have substantially worsened the global pandemic. Traditional food cold chain management practices do not include specific procedures related to SARS-CoV-2-related environmental control and information warnings; therefore, such procedures are urgently needed to allow food to be safely transported without transmitting SARS-CoV-2. In this study, a conjoint analysis of COVID-19 and food cold chain systems was performed, and the results of this analysis were used to develop an improved food cold chain management system utilizing internet of things (IoT) and blockchain technology. First, 45 COVID-19-related food cold chain incidents in China, primarily involving frozen meat and frozen aquatic products, were summarized. Critical food cold chain control points related to COVID-19 were analyzed, including temperature and cold chain requirements. A conceptual system structure to improve food cold chain management, including information sensing, chain linking and credible tracing, was proposed. Finally, a prototype system, which consisted of cold chain environment monitoring equipment, a cold chain blockchain platform, and a food chain management system, was developed. The system includes: 1) a defining characteristic of the newly developed food cold chain system presented here is the use of IoT technology to enhance real-time environmental information sensing capacity; 2) a hybrid data storage mechanism consisting of off-chain and on-chain systems was applied to enhance data security, and smart contracts were used to establish warning levels for food cold chain incidents; and 3) a hypothetical food cold chain failure scenario demonstration in which information collection, intelligent decision making, and cold chain tracing were integrated and automatically generated for decision-making. By integrating existing technologies and approaches, our study provides a novel solution to improve traditional food cold chain management and thus meet the challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Although our system has been shown to be effective, subsequent studies are still required to develop precise risk evaluation models for SARs-CoV-2 in food cold chains and more precisely control the entire process. By ensuring food safety and reliable traceability, our system could also contribute to the formulation of appropriate mechanisms for international cooperation and minimize the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on international food commerce. were used to develop an improved food cold chain management system utilizing internet of things 23 (IoT) and blockchain technology. First, 45 COVID-19-related food cold chain incidents in China, 24 primarily involving frozen meat and frozen aquatic products, were summarized. Critical food cold 25 chain control points related to COVID-19 were analyzed, including temperature and cold chain 26 requirements. A conceptual system structure to improve food cold chain management, including 27 information sensing, chain linking and credible tracing, was proposed. Finally, a prototype system, 28 which consisted of cold chain environment monitoring equipment, a cold chain blockchain 29 platform, and a food chain management system, was developed. The system includes: 1) a 30 defining characteristic of the newly developed food cold chain system presented here is the use of 31 Cold chains generally begin at harvest for fresh fruits and vegetables, whereas they 218 begin from the time of processing for meat, dairy products, and processed fruits and 219 vegetables. Precooling is an important preliminary step, in which vegetables and fruits 220 are brought to an appropriate storage temperature, which varies by product type. The 221 cold chain is maintained through a series of steps, including storage, distribution, 222 shipment, and retail, and it ends when a consumer places the product in a refrigerator 223 or freezer prior to consumption. The duration of a cold chain can vary from a few 224 hours for refrigerated goods to as long as several years for frozen products, depending 225 on the specific product and target market (Gogou et al., 2020) . Figure 3 shows key Figure 4 shows a 262 conceptual system structure for improving food cold chain management based on 263 these considerations. In the framework shown above, the three aspects of information sensing, chain 265 linking, and credible tracing are defined in the main stages of a food cold chain. Information sensing is crucial to the framework for cold chain management 267 improvement. Using IoT technology, information such as temperature, humidity, and 268 production labels can be collected and integrated to establish the chain linking layer. In the chain linking layer, the functions of information management, information In the proposed food cold chain improvement framework, a hybrid data storage 284 method utilizing on-chain and off-chain storage, as well as the InterPlanetary File 285 System (IPFS), is adopted in order to achieve appropriate levels of data capacity and privacy (Lin et al., 2020) . The IPFS provides the capability for the system to store a 287 wide variety of types of information, including text, images, audio, and video, which 288 may be indexed in blocks via hashing to allow incorporation into a blockchain. This 289 type of hash indexing meets the requirements for information confidentiality and is 290 suitable for the limited storage capacity of each block in the blockchain. The 291 combined hybrid data storage system provides a reliable, easy-to-supervise, and In the processing step, the smart contract can be packaged and deployed to a nucleic acid testing reveals that the contaminated sub-batch of frozen shrimp was 494 exposed to a surface at the supermarket in city B that was contaminated by SARS-495 CoV-2. As a result of the application of blockchain information tracing, the source of making, and cold chain tracing were improved, as shown in Table 1 2) Fast responses: COVID-19 accidents spread quickly. Therefore, rapid and effective 528 tracing is a fundamental requirement for the proposed system. Blockchain processing efficiency and system concurrency need be considered for actual applications. In this paper, a prototype system was proposed based on conjoint analysis of COVID-531 19 and food cold chain systems. Actual applications and data validation with a focus 532 on data docking and fast responses will the subjects of subsequent work. safety. In addition, the proposed system and its structure will provide a reference for 612 the establishment of similar food supply chain management systems. This study has some limitations. The risk evaluation and prediction model was Combining blockchain and IoT: food-chain 659 traceability and beyond. Energies Cold chain database 661 development and application as a tool for the cold chain management and food quality evaluation Can the coronavirus disease be transmitted from food? 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