Food Industry Looks To RFID To Avoid Next CatastropheFood Industry Looks To RFID To Avoid Next Catastrophe

IN DENIAL

Still, the food industry continues to rely on a bar-coding system that, because of limitations in readability and data storage, provides very little information on where food came from. "To some extent, America is in denial about food safety," says Peter Harrop, chairman of IDTechEx, an RFID research firm. Printed RFID tags, whether on plastic or paper, hold the most promise, Harrop says.

RFID will be on the agenda later this month at the Food Industry Congress in Florida, attended by every big manufacturer. Industry and government officials are discussing the possibility of tagging cases of leafy green vegetables with RFID tags to prevent a repeat of the spinach recall.

Change happens slowly in this industry and has often been in response to a major catastrophe. In 1993, hundreds of people were sickened and four children died after eating hamburgers that hadn't been fully cooked at Jack in the Box restaurants. "It went from a mistake by a $4-an-hour employee to a highly regulated process," says Craig Nelson, founder and CTO of Vigilistics Software, which provides food-tracing technology. "Now charts and records have to be kept in every restaurant to make sure that never happens again."

Change in fruit-juice processing came after unpasterized Odwalla apple juice containing E. coli caused kidney failure in several children in 1996. "Fruit juice was self-regulated until Odwalla. Within weeks, that became a highly regulated industry," says Nelson, who has worked as a consultant to the FDA for almost 15 years, instructing officers on various issues surrounding regulations, manufacturing, and food-industry technologies.

One danger that RFID could help with, Nelson says, is the possibility of a common food ingredient, such as a stabilizer or taste enhancer, getting contaminated at the site of its origin with a substance such as anthrax and then distributed. It could be mixed with a few ingredients at one food plant, sent to another and mixed with more ingredients, and end up at the final manufacturer, where boxes of cake mix or macaroni and cheese are produced. Consider that many processed foods have a shelf life of a few years or more, making it even more difficult to find every contaminated box.

RFID tags could trace the history of every ingredient in a package of food, and RFID readers could scan those tags quickly, getting data into investigators' hands much faster. That capability alone could prevent widespread illness and save lives next time contaminated food ends up on consumers' dinner tables.

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