Exploring Blockchain for Sustainability in the Food Supply Chain: An Affordance Approach

For sustainable development, supply chains need to simultaneously pursue economic, social, and environmental sustainability goals, collectively known as the triple bottom line (TBL). Touted as a disruptive technology for supply chains to attain sustainability, blockchain had a slow and patchy diffusion. This research-in-progress paper explores how food supply chains (FSCs) can develop affordances from blockchain to address critical challenges and improve the TBL performance. It proposes a conceptual model, based on affordance-actualization theory, linking sustainability critical success factors in the FSC to blockchain-enabled affordances and the resulting TBL improvements. The study offers modest contributions to theory by linking affordances with TBL improvement in the FSC which guides future research in exploring how a blockchain-enabled FSC pursues sustainable development