I was imagining a potentially offline scenario where the blocks are physically recorded (i.e printed) and attached to the package as some kind of barcode or QR

I was imagining a potentially offline scenario where the blocks are physically recorded (i.e printed) and attached to the package as some kind of barcode or QR code. I suppose you could also deal with a scenario where the digital record is primarily transported with the shipment as well. A tamperproof log with certain commodity hardware might be easier than guaranteeing secure network access to every participant in the chain. One example I've seen in the wild is Walmart investing in blockchain for food safety. This is me in a sense trying to reverse engineer that thought process/system to figure out what benefits it might bring. Looks like the system I'm thinking of is roughly a Proof of Authority system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-authority). Your point about blockchain being unnecessary here is one of the points brought up in the Wikipedia article under Comparisons.