You had me at cheese but lost me at blockchain.
Maybe the blockchain crypto-anchor that creates a digital 'twin' for physical items would then create that "anchor" (like creating a bitcoin) that can then be linked (traced back) to its source (and intermediate steps like reselling/processing) when the cheese is finally sold in some form?
If yes then that would mean that anybody that deals with "Parmigiano Reggiano"-based-products would have to request some kind of access (userid&pwd, or some ssl-certificate, etc...) and submit transactions (basically like a mini-bank only for this specific type of cheese)?
If yes then a blockchain-based approach might be in some way better? You would have to emit many-smaller-cheese-coins when you produce your stuff and in order to do that you would have to consume a big-cheese-coin (which you received when you bought the big piece of cheese that you used to manufacture pizzas etc that you produce).
Not sure about what I wrote - I might be overthinking some things and overlooking some other things... :P I did mine a few fractions of BTCs many years ago, but the blockchain is still not easy at all to understand for me.
They need a fancy scanner and the right software to verify these embedded trackers anyway. Just sell scanners configured to verify the cheese to anybody that cares to verify their cheese.
It's fine for anyone to mine cheesecoin. Probably better for this specific trade group in fact, if nonmembers decide to use this same blockchain for their cheese as well! Customers can still check if they are buying DOP specifically vs. 150mi-local worker coop biodynamic or whatever. The more widely used this system is, the more wholesalers, merchants, and consumers will learn of it and use it, and the harder it will be for fraudsters to pass off their goods as the Genuine Article.
Who's going to run the CA? Who's going to pay for it? Can you get all the customers to add the CA's public key to their trusted list? Will all the producers and merchants agree as well? The producers are the easy part, they are the ones coming up with this plan. Everyone else in the cheese economy: that could be harder. It's not just verifying the "this cheese was made by X" claim, also at every step of distribution you have to update the log "this cheese was sold to Y" and get that signed too, so all the distributors and merchants need to get certificates and learn how to apply the secret keys to cheeselogs. Using a blockchain also requires some crypto-effort, but it requires participants to agree on fewer things, gives the participants more freedom of choice. I could imagine someone proposing the centralized version you suggest, but apparently this particular group think it is better to do it in decentralized fashion and I can definitely see some advantages to that.
That's a key criteria for being Web 3.0. Now basically, the only new principal involved is that instead of value being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it is produced by the modial interaction of magneto-reluctance and capacitive-interactance... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag