PRINTING AND LABELING
materialhandlingupdate
Total recall
The North American produce industry is about
to unveil a swift, efficient system for tracing
individual cases back through the supply chain.
And it all starts with the humble label.
WHEN E. COLI-TAINTED FOOD CAUSED A NUMBER
of deaths and thousands of illnesses across much of
Western Europe earlier this year, one of the greatest problems investigators faced was finding the source of the deadly bacteria. That has been the case in several outbreaks
caused by strains of E. coli or salmonella in both Europe
and North America.
But containing the damage may get easier in the future.
In the last few years, governments, health agencies, and the
food, foodservice, and grocery industries have implemented a wide variety of initiatives both to prevent those outbreaks and to respond swiftly when they do occur.
One of the most critical parts of those efforts is quickly
tracking down the source of the illnesses and getting the
tainted goods out of the supply chain. That has meant
added responsibility for managers of food supply chains.
To enable investigators to track illnesses from the point of
the outbreak back through the distribution network
requires good information along each step of the distribution process.
The industry has taken several steps in this direction in
recent years. For example, under terms of the U.S.
Bioterrorism Act of 2002, passed out of fear that terrorists
might try to tamper with the nation’s food supply, every
facility that handles food is now required to keep records
documenting the movement of its products one step forward in the supply chain and one step back. However,
industry leaders have long felt the need for a more efficient
and systematic approach to tracking goods throughout the
entire supply chain.
Now, an initiative by trade groups representing produce
farmers in North America promises to extend traceability
back to the field and day the food was harvested. That
effort, the Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI), calls for the
electronic collection and storage of tracking data as goods
move through the distribution process. The overarching
goal is to enable investigators to rapidly track cases back
through the supply chain should an outbreak occur.
A COMMON LANGUAGE
The PTI is a joint effort by the U.S. Produce Marketing
Association, the Canadian Produce Marketing Association,
the United Fresh Produce Association, and GS1 US (
formerly the Uniform Code Council). Proponents believe
detailed chain-of-custody information would protect producers as well as consumers. Once investigators determine
the source of contamination, they could quickly track those
products down and remove them from the supply chain
while avoiding broad recalls that force companies to dispose of uncontaminated food.
The initiative calls for identifying every case of produce
at the time of harvest with a label containing both human
readable text and bar-coded information on the source of
the food. The PTI is more than just another labeling mandate, however. In addition to extending labeling back to the
fields and orchards, it also takes the critical step of establishing standard nomenclature for product identification—an element that’s essential to achieving electronic
traceability across the entire distribution network. At the
heart of the initiative is a provision calling for key pieces of
