With its inherent characteristics of decentralization, immutability, and transparency, blockchain technology presents a promising opportunity to revolutionize the South African food supply chains. Blockchain technology, with its decentralized, immutable, and secure nature, offers solutions to these challenges by improving traceability and accountability across the supply chain. This study investigates the role of blockchain technology in enhancing transparency in the food supply chain among small and medium enterprises in South Africa. SMEs form a critical part of the country's agri-food sector but face challenges such as food fraud, inefficient inventory management, and lack of transparency, which impact food safety and trust. The research adopts a mixed-method approach, utilizing the Technology-Organization-Environment framework and Institutional Theory to explain blockchain adoption among SMEs. The results demonstrate that blockchain-enabled practices, such as smart contracts, records traceability, production tracking, and distribution monitoring, significantly enhance supply chain transparency. The findings highlight blockchain's potential to increase operational efficiency, regulatory compliance, and stakeholder trust. This research provides valuable insights for policymakers and practitioners, emphasizing the need for regulatory support and strategic investment in blockchain solutions to promote sustainability and competitiveness in the agri-food sector.

In today's highly competitive environment, enterprises strive for competitive advantages by actively responding to changes in the network environment through digital technology. This approach fosters continuous innovation and establishes new paradigms by creating new network structures and relationships. However, research on the relationship and transmission mechanisms between digital technology and innovation performance in dynamic environments is still in its early stages, which does not fully address the demands of current social practice. Therefore, exploring the impact mechanisms of digital technology applications on enterprise innovation performance is an important research area. Based on the dynamic capability theory, this paper utilized SPSS 26.0 and AMOS 24.0 software to conduct an empirical analysis of 490 valid samples from the network perspective, exploring the pathways through which digital technology capability influences enterprise innovation performance. The results indicate that (1) digital technology capability is positively correlated with enterprise innovation performance; (2) digital technology capability is positively correlated with network responsiveness; (3) network responsiveness is positively correlated with enterprise innovation performance; (4) network responsiveness plays a mediating role in the impact of digital technology capability on enterprise innovation performance; (5) environmental dynamism positively moderates the relationship between digital technology capability and enterprise innovation performance. This paper enhances the understanding of how digital technology capability influences enterprise innovation performance in dynamic environments, offering new insights for future research. The results suggest that enterprises should focus on enhancing their digital technology capabilities, optimizing network structures, and strengthening network relationships to drive digital innovation.

With the rising global consumer demand for green and healthy food, the tea industry is facing unprecedented competitive pressure. Therefore, how to build tea enterprises with sustainable competitiveness has become a key issue facing the industry. This paper firstly reviews the concept of traceability systems and their evolution and, based on the theory of enterprise competitive advantage, explores the influence mechanism of traceability as a strategic resource on the long-term competitiveness of tea enterprises; secondly, it analyzes the multi-dimensional role of traceability on enterprise competitiveness from five aspects, namely, quality and safety control and guarantee, brand image shaping and trust construction, market dynamics response and consumer feedback, risk response and product recall, as well as technological innovation and efficiency enhancement; finally, combined with the above analysis, this paper constructs a theoretical framework for the competitiveness of tea enterprises, integrates the impact of traceability in different dimensions, and proposes a multi-level competitiveness enhancement model. Through this framework, tea enterprises can more comprehensively understand and grasp the close relationship between traceability and the long-term competitive advantage of enterprises and then make strategic adjustments according to their own actual situation so as to realize sustainable competitiveness enhancement in the future market competition.