Hawaii Plans Trace-Back Program for Fresh Food

At Sugarland Farms, staff members will sort the harvested tomatoes and pack them in cartons for shipment. They will manually attach RFID tags to each carton and pallet, says Jeff Talezaar, Lowry's RFID product manager, then use handheld Motorola 9090s readers to capture each tag's Electronic Product Code (EPC) number and link it with the date and time of the read as the produce is taken to the loading dock.

The Kula Country Farms pilot, Talezaar explains, will include using RFID to track the harvesting process. Prior to picking the berries, farm workers will place an RFID tag on a large corrugated cardboard container, then use a handheld Motorola 9090s interrogator to capture the tag's EPC number and link it with the date and time of the read. Once the container has been loaded with smaller containers of strawberries, the staff will scan the tag again, thereby recording the time of completion. With that data, they will then be able to upload the information to the company PC, helping the company track how long the harvesting took, and how long the picked berries may have been sitting in the fields. That data, including the time when picking began and ended, will be uploaded onto the state-hosted server, where it will be visible only to Kula Country Farms and the state.

At Hamakua Springs, workers will affix tags to cartons and pallets loaded with lettuce, then use a handheld Motorola 9090s reader to capture the tags' EPC numbers as the cartons are packed. The tag ID numbers will again be captured as the cartons are loaded onto trucks. Because the grower is located on the Big Island of Hawaii, monitoring how long the product sits in any location is more imperative, Talezaar explains, since it has a longer journey to the retailer.

The data from the readers used by all three farms will be transmitted via the Internet to the state-hosted server. Once shipments arrive at Armstrong Produce, the pallets and cartons will pass a Motorola XR440 fixed reader, which will capture the pallet and box RFID tag numbers and transmit them to a PC via a cabled connection. There, the iMotion software will direct the data to the server so the growers and retailers can determine when the shipments arrived at Armstrong.

The products will also pass a second XR440 reader installed at a cooler, allowing the system to keep a trail of how long the products wait between unloading and being moved into cold storage. When the cartons come out of the cooler, they will be automatically read again. Armstrong employees will then separate the cartons bound for specific stores, and use a handheld MC9090 reader to capture the cartons' tag ID numbers before loading them onto the trucks.