A small printer may mean a big plus for food safety
August 10, 2010 by Steve HannafordPosted in: In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, New Products
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a number of diseases caused by contamination of the food supply, whether it be green onions, melons, or lettuce. Those problems may now be easier to control with some help from an unlikely hero:
A portable printing device.
In most cases, it takes weeks for federal authorities to track back and find the source of food contamination problems, and meanwhile consumers panic and stop buying a whole category of products, which results in tons of perfectly good produce left to rot.
A new GPS Label Printer from a Florida company named ScoringAg and a Maine company named Advanced Traceability Solutions, could help solve that problem. This product can be taken to the field where crops are being crated. For each box, it can print a label with GPS location information as well as date and time, a label that can be attached to the crate or box.
Should a problem come up, such as salmonella or insecticide residue, the labels allow stores, wholesalers, and food-and-drug officials to trace back to the precise location of the problem and concentrate their quarantine and testing operations on products form the same vicinity, rather than disrupting the whole market.
The portable machine is battery powered and designed to work in field conditions, creating all-weather labels that can stick on a variety of surfaces. And as the food system becomes increasingly global, it can pinpoint imported melons form Honduras or plums from Chile. The portable device has multi-language support. It connects with a secure global database.
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Tags: Advanced Traceability Solutions, contamination, food, GPS, ScoringAg
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