Repost, with comments: Plant Operations: How the Produce Traceability Initiative is Helping Food Safety and the Supply Chain

Plant Operations: How the Produce Traceability Initiative is Helping Food Safety and the Supply Chain

This article from Food Processing discusses a traceability initiative underway for growers to track the "genealogy" of their produce, essentially from farm to fork.  It takes the requirements of the Food Safety Modernization Act to its fullest extent, by extending the food chain to the start of the cycle.



Frankly, this goal is not new.  Many years ago, a large tomato processor I visited was looking to grade farmers based on the yields of their crops.  They would be able to not only create an exhaustive "score card" on their farmers, but be better able to manage line utilization and schedules, for they'd have a better indication of productivity and quality, and saving not only scrap, but positively influence uptime, energy, and other production variables.



The technology is available to farmers today, but it's expensive and complicated, and most growers don't have the IT infrastructure readily available to adopt such solutions.  For example, a product such as IntelaTrac could be used to collect real-time field input (quality issues, watering deficiencies, etc.) that could be fed back into the recordkeeping of the crops.  Once commercially these solutions are simplified, there's no reason they couldn't be used to complete the "farm to fork" traceability.