SCDigest
Editorial Staff
| SCDigest Says: |
 What’s been frustrating for many supply chain professionals and technology vendors is that the tools to make significant progress in food traceability, which in turn could enable a much faster and more focused response to any food safety incidents, have been available for some time, yet little adopted.
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2008 will go down as a critical year in the quest for better food safety, as a number of high profile recalls and incidents caught the public attention in a big way.
Those include the “salsa” issue that was originally blamed on bad tomatoes, leading to the recall of huge volumes of fresh tomatoes, only to have the US FDA later clear tomatoes as a source of the salmonella outbreak and subsequently cite bad jalapeno peppers as the likely culprit - but not for sure.
A short while later, China and parts of the rest of the world were in turmoil over tainted milk products that led to a number of deaths and sickened thousands more.
Clearly, the food safety system in the US and around the globe has room for significant improvement. What’s been frustrating for many supply chain professionals and technology vendors is that the tools to make significant progress in food traceability, which in turn could enable a much faster and more focused response to any food safety incidents, have been available for some time, yet little adopted.
These tools include the basics of automatic identification, such as bar coding and now RFID, data collection networks, and the Internet. Many existing tracking applications based on these tools could relatively easily be enhanced to support the food supply chain, but there has been relatively little software developed specifically for the food supply chain thus far. This is due both to the lack of market demand thus far and probably also the fact that, in most cases, track and trace capabilities in the food supply chain would require the cooperation of several trading partners, complicating the issue.
Lowry Releases New Solution
Still, it was interesting to see Lowry Computer Products, an AIDC-based systems integrator, release a new software application that specifically addresses food industry track and trace.
According to Jeff Tazelaar, a product manager at Lowry, its Secure Visibility solution, which is comprised of several data collection and inventory control modules, has the ability to track food products “from farm to plate.”
(RFID and Automatic Identification Article - Continued Below)
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