Enhancing fruit supply chain traceability through blockchain and cryptographic protocols for achieving UN sustainable development goals

Ensuring food safety and traceability in fruit supply chains (FSC) remains a critical concern, as traditional centralized methods often suffer from data manipulation, lack of transparency, and delayed responses during contamination events. These challenges lead to reduced consumer trust and inefficiencies in monitoring product integrity throughout the supply network. To address these limitations, this paper presents a blockchain-based framework that leverages cryptographic protocols and smart contracts to secure, automate, and validate traceability processes across all stages of the fruit supply chain. The proposed FSC_SDG system enforces trusted data recording, real-time provenance verification, and autonomous policy execution, while aligning with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs). A proof-of-concept prototype was implemented on the Ethereum blockchain to assess performance. Experimental evaluations demonstrate reduced latency in traceability verification, improved data integrity, and enhanced resistance to tampering compared with existing approaches. These results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework in strengthening food safety, transparency, and trust within fruit supply chains.