Scandinavian Group Finds That Tracked Cod Sells Better

But the pilot's focus, Hild notes, was on whether a passive EPC Gen 2 RFID tag and reader system, used in conjunction with EPCIS software, was a good tool for traceability. "We can say, 'Yes, it's absolutely perfect for traceability,'" he states. Although there was some concern as to whether RFID could operate in the fishing environment, with its high level of moisture and ice, 100 percent of the tags were easily read, he reports.

Employees at the fish-processing plant, the wholesaler and the retailer all found the system easier to use and faster, Hild says, than the manual method of visually examining printed labels with an ID number and writing down details of each shipment, the time it arrived and from whom it was shipped. Altogether, about 200 returnable containers and around 600 cardboard boxes were tagged. The read rate, he says, was 100 percent.

Although testing the RFID and EPCIS technology's ability to expedite recall was not part of the pilot, Hild speculates that with the EPCIS data, if there were a case of tainted fish, the recall could be isolated to the few pallets loaded with fish from a specific fisherman, location, time and date, rather than hundreds of pallets of fish processed or received from multiple fishermen at a particular time or day.

The next step toward adoption of an RFID and EPCIS system, Hild says, is the implementation of a system on a larger scale, perhaps across Europe and involving the boards of fisheries in several nations, as well as oversight by the European Union. However, he notes, there is no date scheduled for such a project.

In the future, Hild hopes to establish an automated system in which data about the fish and their location would be sent automatically from the fishing ship while at sea, both to the Swedish Board of Fisheries and to the EPCIS system (rather than using data supplied by fishermen via a cell-phone call to the Swedish Board of Fisheries). He would also like to see the system more accurately link the reusable containers' ID numbers with the cardboard box in which the fish are loaded after they have been filleted, without needing to estimate which container the fish came from, based on the sequence of reads and volume of fish coming down the processing line.