Blockchain Technology for Sustainable and Smarter Food Safety in the Hospitality Industry: Critical Success Factors and Challenges

Abstract

Food safety remains one of the most critical challenges in the global hospitality industry, with recurring foodborne illness outbreaks undermining public trust and emphasizing the urgent need for transparency and accountability in food supply chains. The evolution of the FDA’s New Era of Smarter Food Safety underscores a shift toward technology-enabled traceability and preventive control, where blockchain technology offers unprecedented potential to enhance safety, sustainability, and consumer confidence. This dissertation examines how blockchain can transform food safety systems through improved traceability, transparency, and collaboration within hospitality operations. The overarching objective is to examine how blockchain supports smarter food safety in hospitality by synthesizing evidence on technological, organizational, individual, and external factors, and by explaining the processes through which transparency and traceability shape consumer confidence. The dissertation is structured around three articles that collectively address this objective. The first article presents a meta-analysis of blockchain adoption with a focus on food safety. Drawing from 64 studies and 375 effect sizes, it evaluates 25 success factors and six challenges that influence adoption. The results reveal transparency, traceability, and compatibility as technological enablers, while complexity and lack of infrastructure are major deterrents. At the organizational level, staff knowledge, facilitating conditions, and management support adoption, whereas perceived cost and technological immaturity remain key barriers. Additionally, subgroup analysis highlights differences in adoption between employees and consumers, advancing theoretical understanding and offering evidence-based guidance for policymakers and managers seeking scalable blockchain implementation in food safety systems. The second article employs a qualitative design to explore blockchain adoption for sustainable and smarter food safety in the hospitality industry. Through nineteen semi-structured interviews with internal and external stakeholders, thematic analysis identified nine key themes, encompassing five success factors and four challenges. The results emphasize the role of transparency, real-time traceability, data integrity, and shared governance in fostering trust and accountability, while financial constraints, regulatory ambiguity, and system interoperability hinder adoption. The study underscores the importance of cross-sectoral collaboration and supportive institutional frameworks, contributing to the practical understanding of how blockchain facilitates sustainability-driven innovation in hospitality supply chains. The third article adopts a quantitative approach using survey data from 280 U.S. consumers to examine how blockchain-enabled transparency and traceability influence consumer confidence in food safety. The findings show that blockchain transparency and traceability significantly enhance smarter food safety, which sequentially increases trust in product origin authenticity, a key determinant of food safety confidence. Mediation analysis confirms that blockchain transparency and traceability affect consumer confidence through smarter safety and authenticity-based trust, establishing a novel pathway for understanding technology-enabled consumer assurance mechanisms. Together, these studies offer a cohesive framework that integrates technological, organizational, and consumer perspectives on blockchain adoption for sustainable and smarter food safety. The findings contribute theoretically by extending technology adoption and information processing frameworks into the hospitality food safety domain and practically by providing actionable insights for policymakers, managers, and regulators. Overall, this dissertation advances scholarly discourse and industry practice toward a transparent, traceable, and sustainable food safety ecosystem within the hospitality industry.