Hawaii Plans Trace-Back Program for Fresh Food

At one of the two participating Foodland stores, employees will use handheld interrogators to document the time when the products arrive before being loaded into coolers, then again when they are sent to the sales floor, and once more as the boxes are discarded. At the other store, which has a larger staging area, fixed readers will capture that information at each of the transition points—the dock doors, the entrance to the sales floor and the trash receptacles. The system is also designed to send an alert if a box of produce remains outside of the cooler for too long, such as on a dock after being unloaded from a truck. Such an alert would allow the distributor or grower to respond to the problem in real time by, for example, instructing staff members to move the carton or investigate further.

In addition, the state agency intends to use RFID-enabled temperature and humidity sensors in the boxes at some time during the pilot, Ryan adds, though details have not yet been worked out.

The pilot is scheduled to run through April or May, Ryan says, if funding allows. After that, he says he hopes to see the trial expanded to include all of the state's 5,000 farms within the next three years. That deployment, however—and even the length of the pilot—also depends on funding. In the meantime, he states, "We're going to test how fast we can trace back from a problem and get to the source." At some point during the pilot, Ryan intends to run a mock recall to test the system's ability to trace and recall products. He envisions being able to locate and trace problem produce to its source, as well as launch a recall of other boxes from that batch—all within about one hour.

If the RFID pilot is expanded to full deployment, growers will need to pay for their own RFID tags and readers, which might prove to be a hardship for some. "We need alternatives for farmers who can't afford thousands of dollars for readers," Ryan says. As such, the system will potentially enable farmers to manually input identification numbers for their boxes into the system without using RFID, or to attach RFID tags without capturing a read.

"As far as we know, we are the only state that's done this, so we want to play with lots of things," Ryan says. "We've decided to take a leadership role, and we hope we can be a model for others."