Food Traceability & RFID

John DiPalo, ACSIS’ Chief Strategy Officer, was in Las Vegas recently for the RFID Journal LIVE! Event where over 1,000 people shared the latest in RFID tech for supply chain managers. This was the 20th such event — a reminder that RFID technology is far from new. But advances in this technology have driven value so high and costs so low; supply chain managers are eagerly researching new ways to apply RFID.

At RFID Journal Live! John and a panel of fellow experts put food safety and RFID into the spotlight. The panel spoke to “Gaining a Business Advantage with Food Traceability,” and John was joined by Felix Amiri of AFISS, Sharmeen Khan of OpsSmart Global, and John Wirthlin of Zebra.

We’ll share just a few highlights from the panel because few things are as important to us as leveraging RFID and other data collection technologies to keep our food supply chains efficient and safe. There’s also a strong business case to be made for traceability, and that’s the angle John, and the panel tackled. 

First and foremost: safety. Supply chain operations are always critical, but rarely more so than when they contain food products. An integrated traceability approach that allows companies to comply with current and future government mandates and solves significant business challenges by making it easy to track allergens, warn of potentially dangerous temperature fluctuations, and automatically calculate use-by dates to help monitor product freshness. 

RFID is the perfect complement to this integrated traceability approach. Over the years, food distribution has changed significantly, but the technology to track food has lagged. Due to the upcoming additional regulations around tracking food across the supply chain and improvements in tracking technology, it is time for producers, distributors, and other supply chain stakeholders to start the process of updating the way food is tracked. This will allow producers, manufacturers, and distributors better manage their food supply chains. 

We could keep going: recall management, processing analytics, ingredient sourcing transparency, local farm-to-table initiatives, and much more. So if you missed the event, reach out to ACSIS, and we’ll be glad to share. Ultimately, food traceability is more than checking regulatory boxes. It’s about building trust and brand loyalty and owning your brand’s story through traceability. And that’s a story we can all get our teeth into.