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December 27, 2006 Food Safety Vs Technology…Part 2 (Bar-Codes) In last week’s issue we mentioned an article in the Philadelphia Inquire about a technology company that is working with the latest technology to try and find a way to track produce from the farm to the market. Gary Fleming, the vice president of industry technology and standards at the Produce Marketing Association in Newark, Del, said that this technology does not help stop the problem of contamination to products but “…it would help narrow the scope of recalls and speed the discovery of the source, which now can take days or weeks.”
The picture above shows a picture of an apple with the current PLU (Product Lookup Number) sticker. You can see that the current PLU System only provides the variety of fruit, the grower/shipper, and sometimes the country of origin. You produce guys know and I am sure everyone else can understand that this way makes it almost impossible to track the item. In the produce industry, product comes in bulk on trucks and then separated into bags/boxes of different weights (example a 2lb bag of apples and a 5lb bag of apples). Product from different lots are constantly being mixed together to fill bags which makes tracking even more of a nightmare. What the industry is looking to do is place a bar-code on all pieces of produce to take the place of the Current PLU. Currently the Produce Marketing Associating is experimenting with a new type of bar-code that will carry more information than the norm does now. These bar-codes will have everything that the current PLU has but will also have the grower/shipper and also include a GTIN (Global Trade Item Number). What these bar codes are missing to be completely traceable is information such as item number, lot/batch number, expiration dates. These bar-codes, like with most all barcodes, will be regulated in the US by GS1-US (formerly the Uniform Code Council), a division of GS1. GS1 is a fully integrated global standards organization with 104 members representing 145 countries worldwide. They are the leading global organization dedicated to the design and implementation of global standards and solutions to improve the efficiency and visibility of supply and demand chains globally and across sectors. The GS1 system of standards is the most widely used supply chain standards system in the world, they regulate standards for UPCs and UCC-128.
The produce industry has been looking at a bar-code solution outlined above. This is what traceability will look like. But there will still be a lack of true tracking because we will not know where the produce came from at a lot level. If you are not bar-code savvy the product and manufacture number stay the same and all that is added is a 2 digit number that represents a case or a pallet. As you can probably already see this will make tracking that apple easier but still not completely traceable. If something is wrong with that specific apple you now can find out who grew the apple and where it came from but you would still have no idea what lot that apple was a part of. This technology is still under development and is not readily used in the industry yet but there is a feeling that the food industry is going towards that path. Accomplishing this task is just the first step in creating a completely traceable product and although this would help traceability a great deal the ideal tracking capability would have to be similar to the complete 48 digit UCC-128 barcode on meat and poultry products that includes lot numbers, weights, and item numbers. In next week’s issue we will be explaining how the industry wants to try and accomplish what the 48 digit bar-code(UCC-128) has accomplished and some of its advantages and disadvantages. The Ability To Track An Item From Farm To Fork Is Fast Approaching To Unsubscribe
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