The demand for products like fruits, flowers, seafood, etc. depends on their freshness. Hence, to maintain the freshness, these products are constantly stored in an artificial (mostly cold) controlled environment (Gupta et al., 2019). Supply chain management requires special attention to such products with limited durability, as well as items that require special equipment and facilities for sale, storage, and distribution. This led to the appearance of Cold Chain Management (CCM) (Shih and Wang 2016). Products such as pharmaceutical products, chilled food, frozen foods, and short-lived products are sensitive to temperature, humidity, and lighting intensity need a cold supply chain to manage environmental changes. Environmental changes and fluctuations reduce the quality of products and thus have negative effects on consumer health (Tsang et al., 2018). This issue makes more risks when the product is pharmaceutical. Many medicines need to preserve in a certain range of temperatures to remain effective. The ability to investigate the temperature conditions and validity of medicines permit medical professionals or patients to discard drugs that are inactive or ineffective. When suitable medication is recognized, the supply chain of that medication will require to be monitored closely for the validity of medication and the useful ingredients are temperature sensitive (Dwivedi et al., 2019). Information and communication technology (ICT) systems are used to control the fluctuations of environmental conditions (Monteleone et al., 2017).

These technologies help managers to build various models of supply chain systems using a data-driven approach (Madhwal and Panfilov 2017). Considerable developments occurred in the temperature monitoring with the Internet of Things (IoT), radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, sensors, barcodes, GPS tags and chips and by using them, the location of products, packages, and shipping containers are traceable during the time (Monteleone et al., 2017; Kshetri 2018).

There are some problems in utilizing IoT devices about their vulnerability against hacking and manipulation. Hence, using a decentralized, autonomous, and trusted network such as blockchain is considered to be necessary (Kshetri 2018). Blockchain can be applied to reduce the vulnerability of devices and thus make them more secure (Jochumsen and Chaudhuri 2018). It is also effective in integrating information and increasing the coordination of chain members. In the last decades, there has been a growing interest in blockchain applications in a variety of scopes. In fact, blockchain technology is a peer-to-peer network to record and store information in a safe, integrated, and accessible manner by using impenetrable encryption techniques. Blockchain technology enables involved parties in the supply chain to have more privacy preservation, data transparency, and tamper-proof system throughout the supply chain (Min 2019). Furthermore, it would improve the problem of trace and track the temperature of products in cold chains by the adoption of smart contracts integrated by IoT devices (Bocek et al., 2017).

As mentioned, blockchain is applicable in pharmaceutical cold chain automation and management. The total expected advantages of utilization of blockchain in pharmaceutical cold chains are determining what actions are in progress and performing by who, when, and where (Kshetri 2018). It creates trust among the pharmaceutical cold chain members by presenting them the permissions to know about the product’s quality status at any moment and therefore increases the efficiency and decreases the costs (Koetsier 2017). Applications of blockchain in pharmaceutical data integration prevent resources to be wasted by tracing the temperature of products consequently at any step of the logistic process, protect information from being stolen or changed, and creates a competitive advantage. Mainly, blockchain brings noticeable benefits such as serialization, tracing, securing IoT devices, smart contracts, avoiding counterfeiting, and tamper-proof information sharing systems (Jochumsen and Chaudhuri 2018). In the following the main contributions of this study are mentioned:

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A wide range of blockchain applications in the pharmaceutical domain such as digital identity, serialization and traceability, data integrity, transparency, and waste management are considered.

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A deep insight into the existing research challenges is presented, and future directions in the blockchain-based pharmaceutical cold chain are discussed.

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Different case studies of blockchain-based solutions in pharmaceutical and medicine projects are presented.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 provides the main necessary background knowledge cold supply chain, and the possible application domains. In Section 3, we comprehensively review applications of blockchain in the pharmaceutical chain including serialization and traceability, data integrity, transparency, and waste management. The different cases studied and imperial solutions of blockchain in medicine projects are discussed in Section 4. The discussion and the possible challenges are discussed in Section 5. Finally, the conclusion is presented in Section 6.