Abstract: In recent years, food safety cases have occurred repeatedly. A safe, credible and transparent food safety tracing system is urgently needed to strengthen whole chain regulation on the food industry, improve the level of food security and protect public health. The problems with the current food safety tracing system are mainly concentrated on unstandardized information collection, unsafe data storage, the vulnerable central system, and unprotected privacy during information exchange between enterprises. Block chain technology, with the characteristics of distributed fault tolerance, anti-tampering and privacy protection, can be targeted to solve the problems with the current food safety tracing system. For the above purpose, this paper presents a block chain-based food safety tracing system. First of all, by analyzing the technical structure and properly introducing the block chain into food safety tracing system, block chain technology can be applied to the system’s database layer and communication layer. Then, the operation mechanism of the food safety tracing system is analyzed, and the effectiveness of the design scheme can be demonstrated by combining the specific application scenarios and practical cases.

Key words: food traceability system, block chain, distributed ledger, consensus