When the folks at Dole Fresh Vegetables, a division of Dole Food Co., Inc., began brainstorming ways to trace fruits and vegetables back to the point of harvest, they had no idea they would be setting a new safety standard in the food industry.
While government traceability regulations require companies to track the raw material stream from the "field to the fork," finding a way to quickly pinpoint exactly where in the field a specific vegetable came from has been next to impossible — until now.
Under the leadership of Steve Robinson, vice president of business process development at Dole Fresh Vegetables, the company devised a way to combine existing technology — scanning equipment, cell phones, RFID tags, and global positioning system (GPS) navigation — to create a harvest management system that follows product bins from the fields through the processing steps, which include weighing, cooling, and cold storage. If, for some reason, contamination of the foods is detected at any point in the cold chain, the system, using device management and dashboard displays, provides traceability down to the GPS coordinates of the field — within a few hundred square feet — where the product was picked.
If there ever is a contamination problem — and Dole hasn't had one since it deployed the system a year ago — the company can look at the environmental conditions of the field at the time of harvest to make assessments, Robinson says.