The expansion of the food industry, within and beyond national borders, has resulted in complex collaborative networks and supply chains. The management culture adopted for food supply chains has an impact on the quality of the end product and the vitality of the businesses involved. In this report, we focus on the use of blockchain technology, and distributed ledgers in general, for managing supply chains in the food and agricultural sectors. We explore the challenges with which typical management systems are faced, such as food safety, food fraud, and inefficient processes, as well as ethical aspects like fair trade, animal welfare, and the environmental impact of food production. The use of blockchain‐based systems for managing a supply chain offers significant benefits, such as faster and more reliable traceability. Our analysis, involving small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from Denmark, highlights that SMEs could benefit from blockchain‐based systems that encourage fair trade and authenticity documentation, expose good practices, and decrease management costs. However, due to a lack of important policies and standards, and due to the limited understanding of the technology itself, its large‐scale adoption is at the moment immature. © 2020 Society of Chemical Industry

Authenticity; natural vanilla flavor; biovanillin; 13 C/ 12 C ratio; 2 H/ 1 H ratio; Isotope ratio mass spectrometry Highlights:-Carbon and hydrogen isotopic ratio characterisation of vanillin ex glucose-Database extension of vanilla pods originating from 16 different countries-Carbon and hydrogen isotopic ratio characterisation of a vanilla hybrid

Black pepper is the most widely used spice in the world. Spices are highly vulnerable to economically motivated adulteration as they are high value products and traded along complex supply chains. The main fraud opportunity is to add cheaper bulking materials. Near and Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectroscopy has been combined with chemometrics to screen for the substitution of black pepper with papaya seeds, chili and with non-functional black pepper material such as black pepper husk, pinheads and defatted spent materials. A good separation performance between black pepper and adulterated samples could be shown. After running a binary classification model with an external test set an area under the receiver operator characteristic curve of 0.98 for both, the NIR and FT-IR model was obtained. This study shows the huge potential for a fast and rapid screening method that can be used to prove the authenticity of black pepper and detect adulterants.

Together with the sweet principle component glycyphyllin A (3), seven phenolic compounds including two new dihydrochalcone rhamnopyranosides, glycyphyllin B (1) and glycyphyllin C (2), and five known flavonoids, catechin (4), kaempferol-3-O-β-D-glucopyranoside (5), quercetin-3-O-β-D-glucopyranoside (6), kaempferol-3-O-β-neohesperidoside (7), and 2R,3R-dihydrokaempferol-3-O-β-D-glucopyranoside (8), have been isolated from the ethanolic extract of the leaves of Smilax glyciphylla for the first time. The structures of these compounds were characterized by spectroscopic methods including UV, MS, and 1D and 2D NMR. In vitro antioxidant capacity tests employing FRAP and DPPH assays indicated that 1, 4, and 6 exhibited potent antioxidant activity and are the key phenolics responsible for the antioxidant activity of the leaf extract of S. glyciphylla.

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