Having a consolidated/consistent view of transactions from the full supply chain relative to tangible product could be genuinely helpful for reducing errors that could be consequential from a food safety perspective. It's unlikely to stop cheating since many of these food vendors will almost certain being humans entering transactions at keyboards (and then when you can get compliance with that transaction entry) and at those points all you can do is make cheating harder.
The challenge is how to get that consolidated/consistent view of the world across disparate parties, some of which don't know all of the other parties involved, in a secure enough manner, and in a way that the supply chain participants will be willing to take part in.
Larger players, like Walmart, can set the stage for some of that cooperation to happen just because of their relevance to the market. The government agencies that buy food also want that and also are pushing for it (that's where my clients are getting some pushes in that direction). None of that means the end goal will be achieved for any number of reasons, including many that are not technical in nature... "blockchain" just complicates those odds.
There are attributes of blockchain implementations which are desirable attributes to solve this problem, but they can exist outside of block chains.
In fact, it's part of why I find this Quantum product interesting for this... they seem to have those qualities that would be helpful without bring much of the other baggage.
The only thing that's not clear is how you handle authority (who says who can participate, for example). So I don't think this Amazon approach is the complete answer, but this sort of approach seems like a path which might bear more fruit than trying to implement blockchains for the problem.
In a number of your comments you talk about errors: the transaction processing technology being discussed will not address those issues be they mistakes, non-compliance, or anything other that rather naive cheating.
I think people hear about some of the attributes of blockchain, such as being distributed, and say, "hey, that solves some of the problem of getting disparate, unrelated parties transacting in a common data set."... along with a misunderstanding of trust model and its relationship to data integrity across that shared ledger... and they get all excited about blockchain.
You're right you don't need blockchain and a central database could do it. The harder parts are administrative around the many parties and then getting the parties to participate at all. I think the transnational immutability aspects are beneficial for food safety, I don't think the raw complexity of implementing a new blockchain to do it makes sense.
I do think with the right kind of industry focused solution on top of something like this Amazon product, can be that sort of single database, with some of the helpful parts that have appeal in regards to blockchain and without the complexity. There are still issues which I don't believe something like this Amazon product solves, but I do think it moves the needle.
