Tracking the Field

By Richard Jones Growers that can measure their crop quality, providing suitable raw produce to retailers, can help eroding margins. The public’s understanding of and appetite for food traceability information has never been greater. Consumers and retailers now expect easy access to information on how and where food was manufactured, where the ingredients came from and where the finished item ended up. These expectations are in addition to a backdrop of having to do more with less. Lower yields due to adverse weather conditions and the need to feed an ever increasing population mean it is acutely important to be able manage produce quality and look end-to-end right through the supply chain. Innovative and forward thinking produce providers are implementing solutions that go beyond the confines of the pack-house. These producers are looking to measure crop quality or grade product actually out in the field, well before it even reaches any kind of production process. The goal is to be able to select suitable raw produce before margins are eroded further. Higher graded product will be automatically allocated to meet customer specifications on open orders. However, there is a growing requirement to find alternative outlets and buyers for lower grade produce to maximize profits and keep waste to an absolute minimum. With so many uses for a single crop it is important that producers can track exactly where each case of produce or raw ingredient has come from and where it goes. Innovation and technology are always at the heart of problem solving. Mobile in-field track-and-trace or quality assurance applications that take advantage of the Cloud are becoming increasingly commonplace. These offer cost effective, flexible, user-friendly applications, available wherever and whenever needed via any Internet enabled device. Most applications can offer “store and forward” features enabling continuous data collection, even when connectivity is not available, and interoperability ensures integration with existing back-end ERP solutions. Screens and test sequences can very easily be configured by the user to suit mode of operation or business processes. Once collected, data is usually uploaded to a web portal where information and results are instantly available to be interrogated or displayed in useful dashboards and KPI indicators. This provides a readily accessible platform where interested supply chain stakeholders, customers and other business units can view the data simply by being granted access to the portal. Users can quickly analyze the collected QA data to see what product has passed through, which tests were performed, where and by whom.  Photographs can be appended to a record providing visual evidence of quality or damage, and the test location can be dynamically displayed using mapping data. Connectivity with other external devices is also possible; these include integration with weigh scales, printing to mobile (for some devices) and fixed printers, pressure testers, thermo-meters and probes. It is interesting to observe that field data capture has become almost a safety net to preempt any traceability issues further down the supply chain. Data captured right at the produce source provides essential traceability data on produce origins. This data forms an essential part of an organization’s overall traceability process. Empowering a category manager with meaningful information sourced from every part of the supply and production process is a valuable tool. That unexpected phone call from a retailer requesting an audit of exactly where a particular case of product originated becomes less stressful with end-to-end tracking in place. However, with any system, procedure and accurate record keeping are critical to usability and success. Even the best tracking and tracing systems become ineffective if they are not populated with real “as-it-happens” data. Richard Jones is chief technology officer for LINKFRESH. He can be reached at [email protected].