FOOD SAFETY
Tracking
Will Google for food
Last Updated: Wednesday, April 15, 2009 | 8:39 AM ET
By Rosie Lombardi, CBC News
IBM and the province of Manitoba have tested a federated system to follow meat from farm to fork. (Morry Gash/Associated Press)Tainted peanut butter, hot dogs, spinach: consumer confidence in the food industry is at an all-time low after a succession of disorganized product recalls. Food-contamination scares are driving major changes in the systems retailers and food producers use to do business.
Global food identification standards that all industry players can use are also being developed by GS1, a Brussels-based not-for-profit organization. But the actual adoption of these common standards will only occur gradually as companies convert their existing systems.
In the meantime, suppliers and their customers are going ahead with their own systems to make the food supply safer.
"Traceability systems can't be created in one giant implementation for the whole world," says Susan Wilkinson, an executive at IBM Canada. "But technology exists to link products even if they're not standardized."
The way to move food-tracking systems forward without waiting for everyone to be on the same page with globalized product-identification standards is to start system development with groups of companies that bring high-risk products to market, she says. "So long as you define who all the players are in that supply chain and get them to agree on what information they need to provide and share for traceability, then you can find ways to do it."
Pilot project
Developing interconnected networks that can track food across all the companies involved in producing, processing, transporting and selling it is an extremely complex task.
"The central issue is the high degree of manual effort needed to track items across dozens of partners in a supply chain," says Roy Wildeman, senior analyst at technology consultancy Forrester Research, adding that the pharmaceutical and other industries face similar issues. "Without data standards, security protocols and tagging technologies like RFID [Radio-frequency identification], collecting and sharing information can be an arduous task."
Nevertheless, unified tracking systems designed to handle the job in the absence of perfectly synchronized data are already springing up.
IBM and the province of Manitoba recently piloted a federated system to track meat from farm to fork across 16 companies, for example. It's the first of its kind in Canada, says Wilkinson. The Manitoba Food Traceability Proof of Concept (FT POC) project was a successful demonstration of how a food traceability system might work — but it isn't a live system yet, she adds.
Meat was selected for the project because it's a high-risk product that brings the added challenge of being transformed continuously as it moves through the supply chain. The movements of a can of soup can be easily traced because it doesn't change, but meat is typically disaggregated or combined with new ingredients to create new traceable products, she says.
"The key is starting with a unique identifier, and then to keep interlinking it back to everything that product transforms into," Wilkinson adds. To make external traceability work, every company needs to have internal traceability capabilities to track and link its own input and output batches, which in turn can be linked to external supply chains. But many food processing companies haven't even achieved this fundamental first step of introducing traceability in their own systems, says Wilkinson. "I can tell you from my experience around the world that many big global companies don't have this yet."
All industry players will need to catch up very soon, as the next stage needed to satisfy consumer demand for wide-scale traceability is developing external networks that can take a company's internal information and share it across other company networks in case contaminants, disease or other problems need to be traced.
Federation of food systems
There are a multitude of systems and solutions for food traceability being developed across Canada, says Keith McDougall, franchisee owner of a Sobeys store in Winnipeg and participant in the project.
'Like Google, the food search engine won't know anything by itself, but it will know where to get the information you ask it.'—Dr. Wayne Lees, chief veterinary officer for Manitoba
"Traceability is on all grocery retailers' minds, so it made sense for us to be involved in the Manitoba part of the chain," he says. "But I deal with manufacturers across Canada, so we need to look beyond Manitoba to create a system that works nationally."
Efforts are underway to do just that, says Dr. Wayne Lees, chief veterinary officer for Manitoba. A national task force is working to develop Canadian standards, and other provinces are developing different components of a comprehensive and collaborative system. "This proof-of-concept project with IBM was our contribution to the total traceability movement," he says.
A Google-type model will likely evolve to search across food-related systems housed by provinces, food producers, processors, retailers and transport companies, says Lees.
"I don't think we're going to get one large system," he says. "Like Google, the food search engine won't know anything by itself, but it will know where to get the information you ask it."
The challenge in food traceability lies in developing a federated model that allows companies to share relevant information, says Wilkinson. In IBM's approach, companies can use whatever system they choose for their internal traceability. "Our model sits on top of all existing systems, so it would work in any province and also nationally."
To accomplish this, data is collected at each point, and then loaded into a shared database connected to a network. The hardest part isn't the technology, says Wilkinson. "Getting agreement from companies about the basic information they're willing to share and under what circumstances, and what standard identification they'll put on their products was the hardest part of the project."
Many companies are leery about sharing sensitive information, agrees Wildeman. "Companies could get pricing information about their competitors, the manufacturing margins distributors are charging customers, and so on."
But pricing information isn't actually needed to track the movements of food through supply chains, although computer records typically lump this information together with relevant traceability bits, says Lees. As universal food identification standards are adopted over time, automatically stripping or blocking irrelevant but potentially sensitive information from external traceability systems will be fairly easy with technology.
IBM, for example, already offers the InfoSphere Traceability Server (ITS), which is a system that can automatically share and track the right information about food products that use the GS1's open and interoperable global standards, says Wilkinson. But few companies have fully adopted the standards and the associated system components needed for them, so bridging solutions such as the FT POC project can work in the interim as systems evolve.
For now, data sharing needs to be governed via agreements, says Lees. "People need to develop a level of comfort that they're only sharing essential information in these federated systems — and they feel better with written agreements."
Industry gears up
Major meat processors such as Cargill Inc. are already making demands for electronic information, says Kelly Penner, a participant in the Manitoba project and CEO of Natural Prairie Beef, which produces hormone- and antibiotic-free beef.
"You're not going to be able to ship one animal to Cargill in the future unless you've got all your beef age-verified, certified, documented and online so they can trace it to your farm," says Penner.
He points out that full traceability is a way to replicate the good old days when consumers knew their food producers. "I raised farm-fresh chicken for years, and in the past, people never challenged the price because they trusted me and the quality of my produce. It's that simple concept that we have to take to a higher level today."
Retailers are also making demands at the opposite end, says McDougall. Major supermarket chains will soon refuse to deal with suppliers who don't offer full traceability.
'We need laws, enforcement, inspection — we're inadequate on all of those now.' —Bruce Cran, Consumers' Association of Canada
"We already have standards now," he says. "We won't deal with suppliers if they don't comply with our safety specs, and these standards will only get more stringent in the future. Government mandates would certainly give traceability a push, but industry isn't sitting by, waiting for food safety to happen."
But Wildeman says cost is a major stumbling block in converting systems so that full-blown traceability is possible. Improving food security doesn't necessarily translate into more revenue that allows companies to recoup their investments in better systems.
"That means benefits have to come from operational improvements, not just safety. Actual reductions in labour or improvements in shipping accuracy are needed to justify the additional expense," says Wildeman.
Too little, too slow
Despite initiatives like the Manitoba project, consumer groups are not happy with industry and government efforts to date.
Bruce Cran of the Consumers' Association of Canada is calling for a ministry of consumer protection to look after food security issues. (Orlin Wagner/Associated Press)"We need government-supervised, mandatory tracing," says Bruce Cran, president of the Consumers' Association of Canada (CAC), an Ottawa-based consumer advocacy group. "We need laws, enforcement, inspection — we're inadequate on all of those now."
To illustrate, he cites a 2006 study conducted by the CAC in Toronto after a product recall of carrot juice tainted with botulism toxins. "Six weeks later, we still found this product on store shelves."
Cran doesn't believe industry efforts will congeal into wide-scale food traceability systems without government mandates. "I don't know of any substantive new efforts on the part of industry. The Manitoba project was a little pocket done behind closed doors — no one consulted or informed us about it."
He points out Canada doesn't have a proper ministry of consumer protection to look after food security issues. "We don't have a minister; therefore, we don't have a voice in cabinet."
Canadians who assume the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) is looking after their consumer interests are mistaken, he warns.
"The CFIA has a dual mandate: in addition to protecting consumers, it also has a mandate to promote and sell new foods and products, including genetically modified foods," Cran says. "A couple of years ago, they even did a study about the possibility of bringing cooked chickens from China into Canada."
The notion that industry is best left to self-regulate than to have government step in with its heavy hand is also mistaken, he says. "I've been a consumer advocate for 40 years, and there's not been a single instance where unmandated, voluntary rules have worked. We've got the potential for quite big disasters in Canada if food traceability isn't brought under control."
Although a new consumer protection Bill C-5 was proposed last year, this hasn't been enacted into law, he says. "Health Canada and the CFIA are dealing with laws that are over 50 years old and enacted in an era when there were no computers. The new bill would give ministers the ability to mandate the removal of items from shelves, stop products from coming into Canada, and maybe even hold people who bring in contaminated products responsible for their deeds."
Wildeman agrees government intervention would speed up the food industry's traceability efforts. "It will take government mandates to provide the call to action to the industry. Without mandates, these things tend not to come together to orchestrate companies' IT investments."
