National Food Traceability System in the Making

Moreover, neither supply chain participants nor governments can be expected to be comfortable with the idea of a single organization maintaining a gigantic database that collects and maintains all the traceability data for the entire food supply chain. The technology adopted for a national food traceability system can engender competition for traceability services if it is based on standards that allow for limited data sharing and security. Competition will ensure that there is not a single monopoly provider with undue access to data and will provide choice and lower prices for traceability services that food supply chain participants need to purchase.

Discovery Services

An emerging new technology called discovery services (DS) can provide the solution to many of the questions surrounding the implementation of a national food traceability system. DS is an open, standards-based software protocol that can be implemented along with any traceability or inventory tracking software system. In effect, DS provides a referral service that allows food supply chain participants to find the source of data about a given product. Once the source is found, the participants can choose whether or not to share more data about a given product depending on their commercial relationship.

DS is currently in draft at EPCglobal, an organization that is developing a number of standards for the use of radio frequency identification (RFID) and other types of electronic identification systems. As a referral service, it requires only “thin data”—the who, what, when, and where data points for each food item. Each of these reference events can be provided to a DS to create a complete life cycle view of a food item across the inventory-tracking databases at multiple companies around the world. With this model, companies do not need to share commercially sensitive data and can control who has access to each reference event, while still providing a full road map of where a product has been for trace back during a recall.

In much the same way that standards underpin the global scalability of the Internet and have contributed to its growth and adoption, the DS standards process aims to facilitate traceability across geographic and network boundaries and solve many of the limitations the food supply faces today.

For instance, food supply chains are faced with hybrid identification systems. DS can handle multiple types of product identifiers, from something as simplistic as an animal tattoo to systems as extensive as 2D data matrix or RFID chips.

DS can also handle a critical challenge for ingredient manufacturers, aggregating and disaggregating identifiers from produce to ingredients and back to final meals. For instance, a cow is processed into many different packages of meat. At the farm, the cow is identified with an ear tag or a microchip. Once it is processed, each piece of meat sold from that one cow is assigned its own unique identifier, one that relates back to the cow’s master tag. DS can leverage this aggregation and disaggregation so that when a recall event occurs, the full path, from the tainted piece of meat being sold back to the cow that may have been infected with a disease, can be traced.

The benefit of this traceability is evidenced in the major peanut butter recall of 2009. The recall affected not only peanut butter but also a variety of foods containing peanut products—peanut paste, whole, crushed, and powdered peanuts, and many other products, including granola bars, ice cream, and cereal. Additionally, the distribution network was not limited to supermarkets; it included schools, retirement homes, and restaurants that use these ingredients in their meals. A DS could have provided a clearer map of where the actual affected product had been sent and consumed, so that other peanut butter manufacturers and products would not have had to unnecessarily recall their products and lose millions of dollars due to poor consumer confidence.