Although manufacturing companies are currently situated at a transition point in what has been called Industry 4.0, a new revolutionary wave—Industry 5.0—is emerging as an ‘Age of Augmentation’ when the human and machine reconcile and work in perfect symbiosis with one another. Recent years have indeed assisted in drawing attention to the human-centric design of Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) and to the genesis of the ‘Operator 4.0’, two novel concepts that raise significant ethical questions regarding the impact of technology on workers and society at large. This paper argues that a value-oriented and ethical technology engineering in Industry 5.0 is an urgent and sensitive topic as demonstrated by a survey administered to industry leaders from different companies. The Value Sensitive Design (VSD) approach is proposed as a principled framework to illustrate how technologies enabling human–machine symbiosis in the Factory of the Future can be designed to embody elicited human values and to illustrate actionable steps that engineers and designers can take in their design projects. Use cases based on real solutions and prototypes discuss how a design-for-values approach aids in the investigation and mitigation of ethical issues emerging from the implementation of technological solutions and, hence, support the migration to a symbiotic Factory of the Future.

Food supply chains are benefiting from blockchain technology, as it establishes a shared, secure record of information flows, thus reducing food safety risks, increasing consumers’ trust in products’ provenance and enhancing supply chain efficiency. However, despite some embryonic applications, systematic literature review reports very few investigation studies. This article proposes a potential design and update frequency of relevant data to be stored in the Ethereum blockchain for monitoring and traceability purposes and explores the cost connected to every transaction in the case of a fresh milk processing industry and supply chain, from dairy farms to the end consumers. Results show that (i) investments are limited for the supply chain actors; (ii) the benefits of a blockchain-enabled supply chain can be achieved with a minimal impact on the product’s consumer price, and (iii) the costs of operating the blockchain increases as we move down along the tiers of the supply chain.