CANADA: Will Google for food

15.apr.09
CBC News
Rosie Lombardi

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
"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.
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.
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.
"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."