Abstract
Urban food supply chains face severe challenges in maintaining product freshness, ensuring end-to-end transparency, and mitigating high volumes of avoidable food waste. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a decentralized, blockchain-enabled traceability platform integrated with Internet of Things (IoT) multi-sensor telemetry to manage perishable urban food networks. Leveraging a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric ledger combined with kinetic quality-degradation smart contracts, the platform continuously assesses produce freshness during transit and dynamically triggers waste-mitigation protocols, such as automated price adjustments and local redistributions. Over a 12-week empirical pilot across 14 urban retail nodes and three regional distribution hubs, the framework achieved a 31.4% reduction in perishable food waste and compressed recall tracking latency from 48 hours to under 5 minutes. The network sustained a transaction throughput exceeding 320 transactions per second with sub-second finality, confirming its operational viability for real-time logistics. These results illustrate that pairing immutable provenance records with proactive supply-chain interventions provides a robust technological foundation for resource-efficient, sustainable urban food systems.
