Mapping the Impact of Crop Traceability and Food Safety
The 2008 foodborne disease outbreak in the United States resulted in multiple investigations that led to the identification of jalapeño and serrano peppers as the major vehicles for the disease transmission.
Findings include epidemiologic associations between illness and consumption of hot peppers, the convergence of tracebacks to a single farm that grew both types of peppers but not tomatoes.
The 2008 tomato and Salmonella outbreak was a typical example of how individuals may, sometimes, misunderstand the correlation existing between food and contaminations. Identifying the core problem causing such issues can be easily tracked down, prevented, and averted in the future by using innovative crop traceability technologies.
Crop traceability is significantly enabling the agricultural value chain to track and measure the performance of crops from “farm-to-fork”; right from planting, cultivation, harvesting, supply chain efficiencies, and ending with consumption of products right on the table.
To guarantee farm-to-fork identity-preserved crops, Zowasel is exploring its proprietary blockchain and artificial intelligence data-driven algorithms to develop a “crop traceability module” to track and allow for the imputation of data to enable end-to-end traceability of crops across the supply chain — identity-preservation, grower location hit maps, quality specification, seasonal patterns, harvest and storage information, transportation, and payment systems.
The aim is to enable crop growers, processors, and the final consumer to capture the digital history of crops along the supply chain seamlessly, in a way that would guarantee crop identity, food safety, and quality against the food market falsification, and aids in swiftly responding to food safety breaches.
Importance of traceability to growers, processors, and final consumers Efficient crop traceability is the key to consumers’ confidence, trust, and transparent relationships with growers to achieve global food security and safety. Crop tracking provides a pedigree for data-driven insights and a wealth of information that processors and consumers need to make an informed purchase decision.
Easy accessibility to traceability solutions enables growers, processors, and the final consumers to manage, track, monitor, and share verifiable data in a transparent manner to provide a secure food safety system.
Food safety is a growing concern among consumers and producers alike. According to a 2016 report, there were 764 food recalls in the U.S. and Canada — a startling 22% increase from the previous year. Putting it into further perspective, consider that 52% of recalls cost over $10M and 23% cost over $30M… mind-blowing.
Fortunately, with the rise of innovative technologies, losses due to product recalls can be avoidable, while obtaining consumers’ trust and safety. Traceability mitigates contamination, manages risks, provides better health for consumers, animals, and plants, improves band quality, and pinpoints spoilage in the food supply chain which later is segregated before reaching the final consumers’ tables.
It further helps to increase transparency and efficiency across food supply chains, helping to define best harvest time and distributions- not to mention permitting the verification of products in compliance with either requisite regional, Global GAP, market standards, and regulations. With traceability in hand, data collected can be used for decision-making for vulnerabilities and finding areas of improvement.
Lesson from crop traceability
Consumers around the world are beginning to ask questions about crop safety and demanding a number of quality test certifications to help reduce the possibility of fraudulent activities or unsafe products, such as local foods, sustainable, organic, and non-GMO food.
The Global Good Agricultural Practices (Global GAP) helps to determine certain healthy practices and standards for growers to follow when producing various crops and their standard requirements. Also, programs like Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) are effective and reliable methods that simplify and analyze every step of a process to detect possible dangers and ways of control.
Adhering to such practices and programs aid in obliging safety standards and minimizing the hazards of being affected by bacteria such as E.coli, Listeria, and Salmonella. Further, these demands demonstrate the raise of individuals’ awareness when it comes to food consumption and the importance of leveraging traceability which made possible crop management, improvement in brand reputation, decrease in the occurrence of harm in agriculture, and built consumers’ confidence.
Why food safety matters to us all
The agricultural ecosystem players need to concentrate their attention on traceability in order to guarantee public health confidence and protect the agricultural industry from breaches and harms.
Efficient crop traceability can help develop the agricultural value chain and improve the supply chain inefficiencies, lower the costs as well as improve consumers’ wellbeing.
Zowasel is developing an interactive supply chain map to manage and monitor ethical standards and validate products, all in one secure online dashboard for consumers which create automation systems to integrate information coming directly from the farm to the marketplace including prices, invoices, receipts, waybills, or other value chain data devices without manual data uploading.
The team at Zowasel aims to provide up-to-date crop traceability and certification data delivered to customers based on Global GAP standards to help contribute towards a safer food and supply chain system.
Sources:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa1005741 [1]https://www.croptracker.com/blog/how-agriculture-traceability-protects-both-consumers-and-businesses.html [2]https://www.ictworks.org/why-agriculture-traceability-matters-to-companies-consumers-and-communities/#.X2xvNZNKiCUhttps://www.foodsafetymagazine.com/enewsletter/the-importance-of-food-traceability/
Desk writer: Reef Alhjjy
