Taiwanese Seafood Producer Tracks Fish to the Dish

The RFID solution takes the complexity out of tracking the fish, says Anush Kumar, senior product manager for Microsoft's BizTalk RFID division, which provides the software allowing RFID reads to be gathered, stored and shared with restaurants. To alleviate the cost of the system, Tekho is charging about 10 percent more to restaurants for the added data they have about a particular fish.

About one year ago, Microsoft BizTalk began building the RFID component of Tekho's Ubiquitous Live Fish Traceability system. According to Kumar, Tekho was already using BizTalk for business analytics, with workers manually inputting temperature data and other details about the water in which fish were located, as well as information about the type of food the fish were fed. All of this data was saved in Tekho's server, hosted by BizTalk. When a government certifier inspects a fish during its life at the farm, Kumar says, that information is also stored in the server.

Thanks to RFID, each fish's life and health history is available to consumers.

Whenever a restaurant places an order, workers at the An Pin Live Fish Center remove grouper from a tank and attach passive 13.56 MHz tags to each fish's gills by means of a wire extending to the mouth, making the tagging more tamper-resistant. Supplied by the Asia Smart Tag Co., the tags comply with the ISO 15693 standard and are encased in plastic to make them waterproof and durable.

Employees scan the tag's unique ID number with a U-grid Technology handheld RFID interrogator, built into a PDA made by Macrotec Electronics. That number, as well as the time of the shipment and the fish's weight, is then linked to details already stored in the back-end system.

When a diner at a participating restaurant selects a fish, employees use the same model of handheld reader to capture that grouper's tag ID number and access its historical data, stored in the BizTalk server. The workers then provide a printout for the patron to study before deciding whether the fish is acceptable. If the customer approves the grouper, its RFID tag is removed and sent back to Tekho for reuse.

Wu says he expects to see a return on the company's investment, but has not yet done so. "I predict one more year for a full ROI, because of the initial investment and all the tags are returned back to us," he says, adding, "I've been very excited and happy about [the system]."