Making food easier to track

Local companies ramp up scanning technology that could prevent millions in lost products and revenue

Some day soon, you may be able to scan a bar code on a package of strawberries and find out exactly where the strawberries were grown -- down to the farm and the specific field on that farm.

Some retailers and technology firms are working to make that a mass-merchandise reality. The push is part of a larger effort -- from chips embedded in packaging to software that tracks what you buy -- to use technology to make it easier to pinpoint the source of food-borne illness and manage recalls.

Such technology could prevent situations like last week's tomato scare, in which retailers had no choice but to pull millions of dollars' worth of possibly affected food from stores.

"When you have an instance where somebody identifies tomatoes as the source of illness, the reaction is always the same," said Ed Estes, associate head of the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at N.C. State University. "Consumers quit buying. ... With a little bit of trace back, we can say with authority what is safe."

Tom Furr is on the way to having a system in which he can track items all the way back to the farm.

His Research Triangle Park company, SmartOnline, has partnered with another Triangle company, FoodLoqiQ, to create an online tracking system. "It's really empowering the consumer to type in a number and find out exactly where it came from," he said.

Already, the company tracks 99 percent of the cows in Canada, he said, at the cost of 20 cents per cow. That's reasonable compared with the fallout from a major recall or disease outbreak, he said.

"Look at the spinach scare" of 2006, Furr said. "It took three months before they found out where the spinach came from. ... The spinach industry was affected severely. Had they had a traceability system in there, they could have contained it within hours or days and not have had to destroy all the spinach."

Farmers and suppliers using the SmartOnline and FoodLogiQ system could enter information online that retailers and shoppers could tap to learn about the origins of specific products. For access to the system, they would pay $30 to $50 a month.

But retailers will have to be the ones to push farmers and suppliers to participate in a tracking program, Furr said. Without their insistence, farmers and suppliers won't want to do the extra work.

In Canada, Furr said, the government is the driving force behind the movement to use the system, but the fees are paid by farmers and suppliers.

"A retailer will have to say, 'If you want me to sell your meat or your produce, then you have to use this system,' " he said.

The Wal-Mart effect

Already this year, Wal-Mart, the biggest retailer of all, is making that argument, leaning on suppliers to add auditing features to their processes.

Wal-Mart is also adding radio frequency identification, or RFID, technology that identifies palettes of goods using radio tags that are easy to scan.

The financial benefits for the company go beyond allowing it to keep track of inventory.

"They can get sued for millions of dollars," NCSU's Estes said. "They have to carry millions in liability insurance. That was one thing they could drop if they had RFID."

And with the stakes being consumer safety, consumer loyalty and financial gain, the market for retail tracking services seems only to be expanding.

Joanna Kennedy is a senior marketing analyst for Tomax of Salt Lake City, which makes inventory-tracking software. She said the most popular products have to do with "activity management," or the real-time management of recalls and other actions.