From Farm To Fridge--Well, NearlyFrom Farm To Fridge--Well, Nearly
Beef processor uses RFID to track meat through the distribution channel
Atlantic Beef Products, an Ontario beef-processing facility, just won a gold award from a Canadian IT organization for its use of RFID, tracking software, and mobile technologies.
Atlantic Beef uses Psion Teklogix's handheld computers |
Cows' ears are now tagged with bar codes. Those tags will start to be replaced with RFID tags next month. After the cows are killed, their ear tags are scanned, and a unique record of each animal is entered into Merit-Trax Technologies' database for food traceability. The carcass goes onto two leg hooks, each equipped with an RFID chip. Via a reader, the RFID chips on the leg hooks are synced to each animal's database record.
RFID solves a common meat processing plant problem for Atlantic Beef: To prevent bar-code tags from being contaminated with E. coli on the slaughter floor, they're removed from the carcasses, put into plastic bags, and pinned onto the carcasses once they enter the "clean" side of the manufacturing plant where the meat is cut and processed. Workers who handle bar-code tags and the handheld scanners have to change clothes and shoes when moving to the clean side of the plant so they don't spread contaminants. Since RFID tags don't need to be in a reader's line of sight, they're handled much less, reducing the number of workers needed and the potential for contamination.
The carcasses are split in two and inspected. From that point on, RFID readers and Psion Teklogix's handheld computing devices are used to collect information about each carcass half, including quality of the meat, any instances of degradation to a carcass, and weight. The system lets Atlantic Beef generate invoices quickly; the manual process used to take hours.
Tracking of carcass halves continues as they go into the cutting system, where they're cut into 15 or 20 pieces. Each piece of meat is given a unique ID, in addition to the animal's original ID. Specific cuts of meats are then shrink-wrapped, with identifying information printed onto a bar code. The pieces are then divided by cuts and packed into cases.
Once the meat is unpacked at a distribution point, the trail ends: Pieces are repackaged, and the identifying information is discarded. Still, if Atlantic Beef ever has to issue a recall, it has a record in its database of where every case of meat was sent, who bought it, and information on every animal that went into that case. The system is regularly tested in mock recalls. "An inspector could walk into the plant at any time and want a recall record of all animals killed 15 days ago," says Paul Berry, VP of software development at Merit-Trax Technologies. "We've produced those reports within 10 minutes."
That's not quite traceability from the farm to your refrigerator, but it's a step in the right direction.
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Food Industry Looks To RFID To Avoid Next Catastrophe
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