How do I develop a supply chain DApp on Blockchain

Question

I wish to develop an application which allows a food supply chain to be stored using the Ethereum Blockchain. Here, I want to store assets from a farm that would be viewable by the consumer. They would be able to retrieve the info about a specific product from the blockchain. What I am confused about is- whether a separate smart contract is required for each asset, or if one smart contract can be used to store information about several different assets. Please help me with this concept. 

Answer 1

Either of the ways is acceptable but multiple smart contracts are always preferable. If you are using a single smart contract, you can have a data structure to map the ID of the item to its current position in the supply chain . You can have a simple mapping from an integer for this. This approach gets complicated if you want to track all previous locations of a particular item. Also, any error in the contract would render the entire program unusable and since everything on a blockchain is immutable, it would ALWAYS be there. 

The best approach would be maintain separate smart contract for each item.In each contract you can have a mapping from timestamp/string to a struct to store details of the item. Moreover, you'd need to alter only a particular contract in case of any discrepancies.