Newswise — Recognizing the need to find ways to protect the nation's food supply, Delaware Valley College in Doylestown, Pa has taken the lead academic role in an international trial to help exporters in Australia track food from their farms to U.S. plates using specialized software.
The International Food Chain Integrity and Traceability Project will review, develop and test supply chain documentation systems using software to improve the quality, safety, security and business efficiency of food export supply chains.
The project will investigate every aspect of the supply process from paddock to plate. It will involve Victorian, Australia beef producers, their commercial customers in Philadelphia and each regulator, transport and logistics supplier along the chain.
"Traceability is of great concern in the supply chain," says Thomas Kennedy, director of the MBA program in Food and Agribusiness. "Adopting software tracking protocols to increase the safety and security of our food is a priority. Our primary goal for participating in this project is to increase the knowledge of food safety and supply chain management among our students who will need to understand these concepts in order to be leaders within the industry."
According to Kennedy, the food chain is highly vulnerable. Current methods for managing risk in the chain are problematic and primarily manual. But software can help break the supply chain into pieces and combine the details of what happens in each piece to provide full visibility of the chain to pinpoint gaps in safety and security.
"A lot of vulnerabilities crop up when products are co-mingled " when one farmer's lettuce, for example, is mixed with other lettuce and bagged for sale."
Though the record-keeping section of the nation's Bioterrorism Act already has larger companies doing a form of tracking, the International Food Chain Integrity and Traceability Project gets more detailed, more comprehensive and global. Every type of activity in every node of the supply chain is captured electronically and stored in databases to allow for quick backtracking in cases where the safety of a given food was in question.
The program is based on the principles of Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points " the same approach the FDA and USDA already use. "Critical control points are any time one part of the supply chain moves to the next," Kennedy explains. "For example, when a dairy farmer has milk stored in his tank and the co-op driver shows up and puts that milk in the truck's tank with other farmers' milk, that's a critical control point."
"What we're doing is capturing information on every part of the supply chain all the way through to the consumer, investigating every imaginable input " from what the farmer is feeding cattle, where that feed came from, what shots the vet gave them, where the nearest water well is to the farm and so on" adds Kennedy. "A system with that much information stored electronically will be invaluable should a safety issue occur."
ICON Global Link, a business management consultancy and IT solution provider, will test the electronic documentation system while working with all project participants and members of the supply chains, from growers, logistics specialists and transporters, to the ports of Melbourne and Philadelphia and commercial customers in US markets. Using ICON's software, risk is monitored in every node and process, enabling management of product integrity, pedigree, traceability and chain of custody.
"We are the only school in the US offering our students this comprehensive a scope in the area of traceability, but we feel it is an important component to the future of the ag business," says Kennedy. "We want to educate the next generation of food supply leaders with as many available tools and methodologies as are available."
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