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Paper short abstract

Food companies deploy blockchain technologies to perform futures of transparent, accountable and sustainable cold chains. This study examines how such sociotechnical imaginaries are co-produced by contradictory infrastructures that undermine their transformative promises.

Paper long abstract

In recent years, companies have increasingly deployed blockchain-based systems to securitise food supply chains, which encompasses tracking and stabilising cold-chain temperatures. While conventional traceability systems remain widespread and other digital tracking approaches expand, blockchain technology in particular is affectively charged with manifold promises of efficiency, sustainability, accountability and transparency by technically enabling shared ‘immutable’ records that reconfigure monitoring and trust along the food supply chain and its various business relations.

Digital securitisation technologies, and blockchains in particular, promise a new evidence regime: data, once entered, becomes ‘frozen’, just like the product it represents, and mirrors its movement as a supposedly immutable object through the cold chain. We analyse these linkages of digital foodscapes and coldscapes through the lens of thermal regimes (Starosielski 2021) and ask how infrastructures of cold are governed around a specific set of cultural values such as freshness and biosecurity.

Building primarily on industry sources and policy reports (whitepapers, roadmaps, strategy documents, websites), this exploratory review maps and questions dominant narratives that paint low-waste, accountable, transparent ‘coldness’ as a securitisable object, which can be stabilised through digital infrastructures. We argue that these promises are fragile: they are co-produced by energy-intensive information infrastructures that contradict claims of sustainability; by often invisible human labour, which stands in contrast to narratives of efficiency and automation; and by opaque platform governance structures that sit uneasily with the transparency narrative.