From a paper of Ricardo Borges dos Santos, Nunzio Marco Torrisi, and Rodrigo Palucci Pantoni
Certification strategies are gaining widespread customer support and constitute
an important vector in changing how food will be obtained and distributed in the future.
Third-party certification (TPC) differs from first and second party certification mainly
because the third-party authority that issues the certificate has no interest in the transaction.
Third-Party Certification of Agri-Food Supply Chain Using Smart Contracts and Blockchain Tokens is a paper that answers this research questions:
RQ1: “Is it possible to establish a harvest TPC mechanism with tamper-resistant certificates
easily available to anyone, even previously unknown food supply chain stakeholder via
mobile devices?”
RQ2: “If one such mechanism is possible, who will carry the data input and maintenance
costs? In other words, how will each stakeholder be incentivized to use this mechanism?”
RQ3: “If one such mechanism is possible, what would be the typical time for the response
to a certification query, in other words what quality of service can be expected by the
end consumer?”