Suppose one fine morning you enter your kitchen to prepare an awesome breakfast and take out a new pack of cheese from your refrigerator. The moment you unpack the first slice of cheese, you come across a slice of spurious cheese which stuns you as it comes from a brand you trust a lot. You bewilder at the sight of the spurious cheese slice and understand that there has been counterfeiting of the product at some stage in the supply chain. But where? Where exactly did the spurious product enter the value chain like a Trojan horse and made its way unnoticed? Was it at the retailer that someone replaced some of the genuine products with fake ones, or was it at the packaging site that some unscrupulous person do the deceit?

Such cases of counterfeiting in consumer products category can be a huge blow to customer’s trust, confidence and satisfaction with a brand. At the same time, the brand also suffers a fatal blow as the mismanagement of its value chain gets exposed. And with the process of finding out the gaps becoming all the more complex, it becomes difficult to precisely locate where the malpractice happened. A complete visibility into the granular details of the supply chain is required, which is far from getting tampered by the crooked entities. And this is where Blockchain enters as a viable option.

How can Blockchain possibly help?

Blockchain is a distributed ledger that stores information in an immutable fashion over a decentralized network. A piece of information making its way to the Blockchain gets added as a block of information after all relevant stakeholders approve the same. Once the block is added, there is no going back. No one can tamper it single-handedly, first because any alteration will require authentication from multiple parties, and second, altering any block will require undoing the other subsequent blocks that have got added. Since blocks get added at a rapid pace, it is impossible to undo all subsequent blocks to alter one block of information, and then again piece the subsequent blocks back into their place. This makes a distributed ledger a very viable option for information storage in a very transparent and secure fashion.

Blockchain at the manufacturer’s place

When the manufacturer of the consumer product, say the cheese slice, produces a batch of products, a Quick Response (QR) code must be generated and attached to the batch or the individual consignments. The QR code contains all information regarding the date of manufacture, ingredient composition of the product, hygiene and environment parameters and location of production, among other parameters. The boxes are well sealed in a way that any damage to the packaging damages the QR code as well. The products are then transferred to the shipping companies and the set of QR codes are shared with the distributor.

Live tracking during shipping phase

The shipping phase is again a stage in the supply chain where a lot of damage can happen to the genuine products because of the mismanagement of the hygiene and environment conditions. Therefore, IoT sensors in the trucks and lorries will be leveraged to keep a track of all the environment conditions, like humidity, temperature, pressure, air flow, heat generated, jerks on the way, etc. This live tracking of the parameters in the real-time helps to maintain visibility over the performance of the logistics company. Any anomaly in the transportation process and the environment parameters alerts the logistics firm and the manufacturer, thereby demanding immediate action. And yes, all the data goes to the ledger to be stored immutably for further rounds of validation and audit.

Distributor does a round of check

Sanity check over the consignments delivered by the manufacturer will be done by the distributor who receives the products. The packages will be scanned one by one and the QR codes will be mapped against the database shared by the manufacturer. Only on complete authentication will the consignment be accepted.

Once the system shows that the consignment is genuine, the distributor will accept the receipt of goods and a smart contract will kick in to complete the automated payment process. The QR codes mapped at the distributor’s side will again be added to the ledger.

When the distributor dispatches the products to the retailer, it shares the QR codes of those products as well. The entire round of IoT-enabled logistics comes to picture again.

Retailers jump to action

The retailers go through the QR scanning process again and they authenticate the products are genuine. In case any package carries a QR code different from the ones in the database or has a damaged QR, an alert shall be raised and the QR code lying unmapped in the database will be identified as lost or stolen. The logistic company will then be apprehended and the IoT data will be reevaluated to see if the truck stopped somewhere or the location of the package was changed. The GPS sensors will give the current location of the package or the last tracked location. This will give insights into where the counterfeiting was done.

Customer – the new activist

Even when customers purchase a product which they find spurious, they can raise a complaint on the grievance portal of the company. They will feed in the batch number, lot number and manufacturing date. The corresponding package number and supply chain network will be identified and informed to the manufacturer. This way, the manufacturer will know which supply line has been tampered with and where the issues have cropped up. The supply line will be traced back from the customer to the retailer, distributor and manufacturer to identify where the gaps existed.

In a way, the entire track and trace of consumer products shall happen using blockchain and the transparency in the network will be powered by the immutability of distributed ledger. All changes and updates in the supply chain will be stored permanently on the blockchain network.

Final thoughts

Blockchain can be a savior for the manufacturing companies and can usher in a new era of visibility over the entire supply chain for all the stakeholders. The track and trace of consumer products – their authenticity, quality and management – will be much more robust and will involve much higher transparency. The supply chains of tomorrow will be powered by IoT analytics, edge intelligence and blockchain to make consumer products industry much safer and trustworthy for all the relevant stakeholders.