Produce traceability is an important link in protecting public health since it allows health agencies to more quickly and accurately identify the source of contaminated fruit or vegetables believed to be the cause of an outbreak of foodborne illness, remove them from the marketplace, and communicate to the supply chain.
Since many fruits and vegetables are eaten raw, the produce industry‚ from farmer to retailer, works diligently to protect these foods from contamination. Despite their best efforts, foreign matter can occasionally contaminate produce in the field or orchard, in packing or processing, in transit or storage. Controlled cold chains are frequently used.
Because traceability systems can provide information on the source, location, movement and storage conditions of produce, they also allow growers, packers, processors and distributors to identify factors affecting quality and delivery.
Beginning in 2008, an industry-led effort to enhance traceability throughout the entire produce supply chain was launched as the Produce Traceability Initiative.
Trends in outbreaks of produce-related illness
An analysis of 3,500 food-poisoning outbreaks between 1990 and 2003 found that contaminated produce was responsible for the greatest number of individual foodborne illnesses. The study, by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, found that produce caused 428 outbreaks and 23,857 cases of illness.[1]
Authorities note that several factors have contributed to the rise in outbreaks:
Great consumption of fresh produce, especially cut fruits and vegetables.
Wider distribution.
Improved electronic reporting of outbreaks.
An aging population more susceptible to foodborne illness.
Unlike meat, which can be rid of bacteria through proper cooking, fresh produce is often meant to be consumed raw.[2]
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration noted in 2007 that fruit and vegetable-related outbreaks of food poisoning are on the rise and had struck in spinach, tomatoes, lettuce and cantaloupes. The agency urged fruit and vegetable processors to adopt food safety plans similar to those in the meat industry.[3]
An outbreak of Salmonella Saintpaul in 2008 was characterized by the US Center for Disease Control as the largest foodborne outbreak in a decade. Some 1304 infected persons were identified in 43 states, at least 252 were hospitalized and two deaths were possibly linked to the outbreak. CDC noted that the trace back of fresh produce, such as tomatoes, through the supply chain could be very difficult and labor-intensive.[4] Ironically, the carrier item was ultimately determined to be jalapeño peppers, not tomatoes.[5]
Benefits
Tracing of an item through various stages of production, manufacturing, processing, handling, transportation, sales and consumption is a widespread practice in today's world. Manufacturers may require purchasers to register ownership of a product to facilitate possible future recall for safety reasons or warranty fulfillment. The Post Office and package delivery companies make widespread use of tracking packages from pickup to delivery, even to destinations on the other side of the world.Some often-recognized benefits of traceability include:[citation needed]
Ability to determine the origin of a product, ingredient or component.
Simplifies problem-solving in event of defective or contaminated product, ingredient or component.
Allows issues to be more quickly identified, contained and resolved.
Limits losses and lowers costs.
Protects public health and safety.
Builds trust and confidence in affected products, businesses or systems.
Improves operating efficiencies for growers, packers and shippers.[7]
Voluntary industry initiatives
In 1930, produce industry leaders sponsored legislation to require an internal trail of accounting between buyers and sellers along the entire produce marketing chain. This law, the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act (PACA) of 1930, set the foundation for basic traceability.[8] More recently, the Bioterrorism Act of 2002 required food companies to keep records that could be traced in the produce supply chain (i.e.one step up and one step back).[9] Based on these records, many organizations in the fresh produce distribution chain have long maintained the ability to trace products inside their enterprise. In simple terms, they know where they got it and where they sent it, but with products that may move through multiple parties who may transform or comingle them, trying to connect many links quickly in time of crisis is a challenge.[citation needed]
Some 30 years ago, manufacturers and retailers created an organization called GS1 to improve the efficiency of the distribution of food and consumer goods to supermarkets.[10][11] One of its many programs was to develop the now-familiar bar code on products that can be scanned at checkout by retailers. GS1‚international standards will provide the foundation for the PTI.
Multiple shippers, distributors and retailers in the produce industry have endorsed the Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI) to encourage adoption of whole chain traceability. The initiative's sponsor associations include United Fresh Produce Association (United Fresh), Canadian Produce Marketing Association (CPMA) and Produce Marketing Association (PMA).[12] Both internal and external traceability programs are needed in order to effectively track and trace product up and down the supply chain, achieving whole-chain traceability. At present, most companies have internal traceability programs but not external traceability. The PTI outlines a six-step course of action to achieve chain-wide adoption of electronic traceability of every case produce by the year 2012. Meanwhile, companies are putting into operation technologies that will support the PTI.
Legislative and regulatory matters
Traceability of food is legally required in the European Union (Regulation 178/2002) with dedicated initiatives in EU countries and the UK[13] and Northern Ireland.[14]
In the United States, various government agencies have oversight or regulatory control over different aspects of fresh fruit and produce production, processing and distribution. These include the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control. Some groups have pushed for a single food-safety agency, on-farm improvements and improved reporting and surveillance of foodborne illness outbreaks.[19]
The draft Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 was introduced May 27, 2009, in the U.S. House of Representatives. It would expand FDA authority, require registration of food manufacturers and processors, regulate crop cultivation and harvesting and other measures. After committee hearings and extensive amendment, the bill (HR2749) passed the House on July 30, 2009. HR2749 does not specifically endorse the PTI, or prescribe a traceability method or methodology, but instead Section 107 calls for regulations establishing a tracing system that includes:
the establishment and maintenance of lot numbers;
a standardized format for pedigree information; and
the use of a common nomenclature for food
with a goal of identifying each person who grows, produces, manufactures, processes, packs, transports, holds, or sells food in as short a timeframe as practicable but no longer than 2 business days. The measure has since died in the Senate.[20]
In parallel, the White House created a Food Safety Working Group[21] which has issued statements calling for a national traceability system that would enhance traceability of all food, but without specifically endorsing a particular approach.
RFID is often used with track-and-trace solutions, and has a critical role to play in supply chains. RFID is a code-carrying technology, and can be used in place of a barcode to enable non-line of sight-reading. Widespread deployment of RFID has been inhibited by certain limitations of the technology: tag cost, tag readability and privacy issues. The cost of RFID tags currently limits their economic justification for item level tagging or case-level tagging in the produce industry. Reading RFID tags requires specialized equipment limiting their usefulness for consumers today. Product orientation, packing density and materials (in particular water, which is predominant in produce) can have a significant detrimental effect on read reliability of passive tags. Finally, the widespread use of RFID tags on consumer goods is anticipated to be contentious until privacy concerns can be satisfied.[citation needed]
Some produce traceability makers use matrix barcodes to record data on specific produce.
Barcoding is a common and cost-effective method used to implement traceability at both the item and case-level. Variable data in a barcode or a numeric or alphanumeric code format can be applied to the packaging or label. The secure data can be used as a pointer to traceability information and can also correlate with production data such as time to market and product quality.[24]
Packaging converters have a choice of three different classes of technology to print barcodes:
Inkjet (dot on demand or continuous) systems are capable of printing high resolution (300 dpi or higher for dot on demand) images at press speed (up to 1000fpm). These solutions can be deployed either on-press or off-line.
Laser marking can be employed to ablate a coating or to cause a color change in certain materials. The advantage of laser is fine detail and high speed for character printing, and no consumables. Not all substrates accept a laser mark, and certain colors (e.g. red) are not suitable for barcode reading.
Thermal Transfer and Direct Thermal. For lower speed off-press applications, thermal transfer and direct thermal printers are ideal for printing variable data on labels.
Software systems are available for managing traceability throughout the entire production, processing, marketing and distribution system. Some of these software systems combine multiple software modules allowing the producer to capture traceability information from all farming, processing and packing activities. Others, capture data in the field and packing operations to integrate with retail buying platforms and carry data all the way to the end consumer. Leveraging new advancements in mobile technology, food brands are now incorporating mobile messaging and QR codes on product labels. Consumers can text or scan the barcode with smartphones for immediate retrieval of product information.[citation needed]
Consumers can also trace the origins of their purchased produce at websites. Consumers can type a code found on a produce item into a search box at the tracing website and view information about the grower, field, and packing operation that the produce came from.[citation needed]
Traceability is the capability to trace something. In some cases, it is interpreted as the ability to verify the history, location, or application of an item by means of documented recorded identification.
Good agricultural practice (GAP) is a certification system for agriculture, specifying procedures that must be implemented to create food for consumers or further processing that is safe and wholesome, using sustainable methods. While there are numerous competing definitions of what methods constitute good agricultural practice, there are several broadly accepted schemes that producers can adhere too.
Foodborne illness is any illness resulting from the contamination of food by pathogenic bacteria, viruses, or parasites, as well as prions, and toxins such as aflatoxins in peanuts, poisonous mushrooms, and various species of beans that have not been boiled for at least 10 minutes.
The Electronic Product Code (EPC) is designed as a universal identifier that provides a unique identity for every physical object anywhere in the world, for all time. The EPC structure is defined in the EPCglobal Tag Data Standard, which is a freely available standard. The canonical representation of an EPC is a URI, namely the 'pure-identity URI' representation that is intended for use when referring to a specific physical object in communications about EPCs among information systems and business application software.
Dole plc is an Irish-American agricultural multinational corporation headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. The company is among the world's largest producers of fruit and vegetables, operating with 38,500 full-time and seasonal employees who supply some 300 products in 75 countries. Dole reported 2021 revenues of $6.5 billion.
The Consumer Brands Association (CBA), formerly the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), is a United States-wide trade association for manufacturers of consumer packaged goods (CPG).
GS1 is a not-for-profit, international organization developing and maintaining its own standards for barcodes and the corresponding issue company prefixes. The best known of these standards is the barcode, a symbol printed on products that can be scanned electronically.
In the distribution and logistics of many types of products, track and trace or tracking and tracing concerns a process of determining the current and past locations of a unique item or property. Mass serialization is the process that manufacturers go through to assign and mark each of their products with a unique identifier such as an Electronic Product Code (EPC) for track and trace purposes. The marking or "tagging" of products is usually completed within the manufacturing process through the use of various combinations of human readable or machine readable technologies such as DataMatrix barcodes or RFID.
The 2006 North American E. coli outbreak was an Escherichia coli O157:H7 outbreak from prepackaged spinach. The outbreak occurred in September 2006, and its origin was an Angus cattle ranch that had leased land to a spinach grower. At least 276 consumer illnesses and 3 deaths have been attributed as a result from the outbreak.
Food safety is used as a scientific method/discipline describing handling, preparation, and storage of food in ways that prevent foodborne illness. The occurrence of two or more cases of a similar illness resulting from the ingestion of a common food is known as a food-borne disease outbreak. This includes a number of routines that should be followed to avoid potential health hazards. In this way, food safety often overlaps with food defense to prevent harm to consumers. The tracks within this line of thought are safety between industry and the market and then between the market and the consumer. In considering industry-to-market practices, food safety considerations include the origins of food including the practices relating to food labeling, food hygiene, food additives and pesticide residues, as well as policies on biotechnology and food and guidelines for the management of governmental import and export inspection and certification systems for foods. In considering market-to-consumer practices, the usual thought is that food ought to be safe in the market and the concern is safe delivery and preparation of the food for the consumer. Food safety, nutrition and food security are closely related. Unhealthy food creates a cycle of disease and malnutrition that affects infants and adults as well.
A fruit stand is a primarily open-air business venue that sells seasonal fruit and many fruit products from local growers. It might also sell vegetables and various processed items derived from fruit. The fruit stand is a small business structure that is primarily run as an independent sole proprietorship, with very few franchises or branches of larger fruit stand conglomerates, though many large food industry businesses have developed from fruit stand businesses.
The terms active packaging, intelligent packaging, and smart packaging refer to amplified packaging systems used with foods, pharmaceuticals, and several other types of products. They help extend shelf life, monitor freshness, display information on quality, improve safety, and improve convenience.
Top 10 is a produce trademark that is restricted in its use to small independent American farms. In a press release dated June 1, 2009, the company that owns the brand announced it was the first "100% traceable produce brand" The brand was created to encourage smaller growers in areas such as Salinas Valley, California, to work together to market item-level traceable produce directly to consumers. Most of the smaller farms selling under the brand sell a significant portion of their produce locally, as "locally grown" produce. The ability of the consumer to verify the actual location of the grower is a brand feature highlighted by the claim of 100% item level traceability.
Post-harvest losses of vegetables and fruit occur at all points in the value chain from production in the field to the food being placed on a plate for consumption. Post-harvest activities include harvesting, handling, storage, processing, packaging, transportation and marketing.
The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) was signed into law by President Barack Obama on January 4, 2011. The FSMA has given the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) new authority to regulate the way foods are grown, harvested and processed. The law grants the FDA a number of new powers, including mandatory recall authority, which the agency has sought for many years. The FSMA requires the FDA to undertake more than a dozen rulemakings and issue at least 10 guidance documents, as well as a host of reports, plans, strategies, standards, notices, and other tasks.
In 2006, there were several outbreaks of foodborne illness from spinach and lettuce contaminated by E. coli O157:H7.
Driven by fresh-market use, the consumption of spinach has been on the rise in the United States. Per capita use of fresh-market spinach averaged 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) during 2004–06, the highest since the mid-1940s. The fresh market now accounts for about three-fourths of all US spinach consumed. Much of the growth over the past decade has been due to sales of triple-washed, cello-packed spinach and, more recently, baby spinach. These packaged products have been one of the fastest-growing segments of the packaged salad industry.
Food safety in Australia concerns the production, distribution, preparation, and storage of food in Australia to prevent foodborne illness, also known as food safety. Food Standards Australia New Zealand is responsible for developing food standards for Australia and New Zealand.
Food safety in the United States relates to the processing, packaging, and storage of food in a way that prevents food-borne illness within the United States. The beginning of regulation on food safety in the United States started in the early 1900s, when several outbreaks sparked the need for litigation managing food in the food industry. Over the next few decades, the United States created several government agencies in an effort to better understand contaminants in food and to regulate these impurities. Many laws regarding food safety in the United States have been created and amended since the beginning of the 1900s. Food makers and their products are inspected and regulated by the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture.
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