Reusable Packaging News
RPN
Improving Farm-to-Table Transparency
What happens when the food you buy has been identified as having Salmonella or E. coli? You may not know where or how your Caesar salad was affected. You just know you don’t want your family to get sick when eating it.
This year, many customers and grocers were forced to throw away large amounts of romaine lettuce when an E. coli contamination in romaine lettuce spread through the food industry. Health officials at the Centers for Disease Control told Americans to avoid eating lettuce that was grown in Yuma, Arizona.
“But it was difficult for consumers to know how to determine where their lettuce was grown,” explained Frank Yiannas, VP of Food Safety at Walmart.
“None of the bags of salad had ‘Yuma, Arizona’ on them,” he said. “In the future, using the technology we’re requiring, a customer could potentially scan a bag of salad and know with certainty where it came from.”
It’s crucial to respond quickly and accurately to food safety issues like these. But with the traditional paper-based method of capturing information that exists at many farms, packing houses and warehouses, tracking down important data from multiple sources is extremely time consuming.
With paper-based ledgers, Yiannas mentioned that it may take his team seven days to track down where a product came from. The team has to contact the supplier, get paper records and use those records to contact the company that imported or shipped the product to Walmart’s distribution center.