Can RFID Save the Day for Spinach?

By Leslie K. Downey

The following are my questions to Dean, along with his answers.

If the exact cause of E. coli contamination of spinach and other produce is not yet fully understood, can RFID really help?

Dean: RFID can make traceability a timely process anywhere for spinach and all fresh food. Most produce growers already have the capability to track products directly from the field. However, such tracking is manually intensive, so it's impractical. RFID can make this process less manual.

Steve Dean

The thing is, the RFID-tagged product needs to be tracked throughout the entire supply chain—not just by the growers—in order to execute a large-scale recall in a timely manner. A great deal of thought must be given to the infrastructure needed to connect the data from the various parties in this chain. It may very well take the USDA and other government agencies to help establish this infrastructure.

If that had been in place in September, the shipment data being shared by supply-chain partners would have identified the product that needed to be removed, and eliminated the need to remove all products—a huge savings to the industry.

Would RFID bring other benefits to the produce industry and consumers besides efficient recalls?

Dean: Businesses and consumers would benefit every day from reducing waste. Losses to retailers from spoilage can be substantially reduced with actionable data available to make informed decisions about product at the time it is received.

Retailers and wholesalers may buy three or four days of supply, depending on their needs. With RFID tagging, starting in the field, it's possible to identify a pallet of produce that was harvested earlier or exposed to higher temperatures than the other pallets received. This pallet will be shipped out ahead of the others in order to ensure freshness on arrival.

Restaurants and retailers take immediate ownership of the products they receive. So, reducing spoilage would have immediate bottom-line impact for these businesses. But to do this, they not only need to read the RFID tags, but also be able to access the associated data about the shipments they've received. EPCIS [Electronic Product Code Information Service], the standard that EPCglobal is developing to support EPC-related data sharing by multiple parties, will make this possible.

It's clear that restaurants and retailers would benefit. What about the other parties in the supply chain?

Dean: The shipper can expect to improve its competitive position and increase sales by delivering more consistently fresh produce. The same benefits would flow all the way to growers.

You said that, even without RFID, growers and other companies in the fresh produce supply chain already can track product back to the field. How would this be done?

Dean: In the field, product is harvested and information is collected about how much and which person or crew did what. Product is placed in various containers and transported to a packing house or shipping location. It is then packed, processed, cooled and readied for shipment. Throughout all of these processes, it can be a challenge to maintain the connection between the product and the field it came from. RFID offers the ability to track this data by allowing automatic collection of the data at all points in the process. The secret is in the sharing of data. If I have all of this data and it just stays inside my four walls, there's no benefit to the rest of the supply chain in terms of trace-back or freshness.