Keeping Fresh Foods Fresh
Produce, meat, poultry, seafood and dairy products often travel cross-country or between continents before ending up on store shelves. Given this lengthy journey, using RFID to improve food safety and shelf life has become a top priority for suppliers and retailers.
By Elizabeth Wasserman
Feb. 1, 2006—In the expansive fields of Salinas, Calif., and Yuma, Ariz., farmworkers cut each head of lettuce, wrap it in a bag and place it in a reusable plastic container that holds 24 heads. They have been following the same process for decades until last year, when the management of Tanimura & Antle (T&A), their employer, added a new step.
After packing a container with lettuce, farmworkers now apply a label with an RFID tag containing a unique Electronic Product Code to the container's side. Once enough containers are packed to form a pallet, another RFID tag is applied to the pallet.
The RFID tags, provided by a third-party supplier, are already encoded and the labels printed prior to the harvest crews' use. The EPC numbers of the container and pallet tags are correlated with data identifying the field where the lettuce grew, the crew, the time the heads were picked and which driver took them to the refrigerated warehouse.
Feb. 1, 2006—In the expansive fields of Salinas, Calif., and Yuma, Ariz., farmworkers cut each head of lettuce, wrap it in a bag and place it in a reusable plastic container that holds 24 heads. They have been following the same process for decades until last year, when the management of Tanimura & Antle (T&A), their employer, added a new step.
After packing a container with lettuce, farmworkers now apply a label with an RFID tag containing a unique Electronic Product Code to the container's side. Once enough containers are packed to form a pallet, another RFID tag is applied to the pallet.
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| RFID has the potential to dramatically reduce losses from spoilage in the food industry. |
The RFID tags, provided by a third-party supplier, are already encoded and the labels printed prior to the harvest crews' use. The EPC numbers of the container and pallet tags are correlated with data identifying the field where the lettuce grew, the crew, the time the heads were picked and which driver took them to the refrigerated warehouse.
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