I attended the "Smarter, Safer Food Supply: What’s Next?" Forum at the Rayburn House Office Building on Wednesday. This forum was organized by IBM as part of our smarter planet initiative. More than 70 people attended including clients, academia, business partners, grocery and food associations, White House staffers, press and analysts. Organizations represented include the FDA, Center for Food Safety, United Fresh Produce Association, USDA, Wisconsin Livestock Identification Association, Univ of Maryland, George Mason Univ, Sara Lee, and the CDC.
The event was kicked off by Karen Lowe, General Manager, Global Retail Industry, IBM, who reported on the results of an IBM survey on food safety of 1000 shoppers. According to the survey, less than 20 percent of adult grocery shoppers trust food suppliers to develop and sell food products that are safe and healthy. 49 percent reported being less likely to purchase a food product following a recall. AND the survey was done before the recent Nestle frozen cookie dough problems.
The Keynote was provided by Congresswoman Nita Lowey, NY-18, a leader in the House on food labeling. She stated the need for tougher legislation to ensure the consumers can trust their foods.
David Acheson, Assoc. Commissioner for Food, FDA talked about some of the recent food recalls including the peanut butter recall and the tomato/pepper e.coli outbreak. One of the problems has been the slowed investigation of the tainted food’s origins by the lack of uniform records standards. The full investigation of the source of an outbreak has been taking 2-3 months, and he stated, "We have to do it quicker." He suggested the industry needed unique identifiers, common nomenclature, interoperable data systems, and studies on the ROI for a robust traceability system to help justify the cost of these improvements.
Gay Whitney, Standards Director, EPCglobal and a member of the GS1 global standards organization followed along on a similar theme stating we have the we have the standards for serialized product marking, but need to create the larger interconnected system to be able to identify where a product came from, whether the product is compliant with standards and quality measures, whether the product was subject to recalls, and how to report defects/problems with the product any step in the supply chain. A robust information sharing system is needed to accomplish this.
Caroline Smith DeWaal, Food Safety Director, Center for Science in the Public Interest, started by giving somewhat of a consumer view. 93% of the consumers want Country of Origin on all food, 46% consumers worry they’ll get sick from food, and 52% have little confidence in food safety systems. She raised the question of how we can get more targeted in the recalls that are done. This would help the consumers and also help the retailers. She also talked about some of the legislation moving through in congress (HR875).
Viktor Varan, Project Manager, RFID, Matiq of Norway talked about the food tracking system implemented in Norway using RFID tags on cattle. In Norway, all cattle must be tracked, whereas in the U.S. individual animals do not need to be tagged and tracked.
Dr. Allan Preston, DVM and Assistant Deputy Minister, Manitoba Agriculture, Food & Rural Initiatives then talked about how underdeveloped and developing nations are ahead of North America in food traceability.
At the Panel Discussion, Dr. Harold Schmitz, Chief Science Officer, Mars said Mars wanted to work with government, universities, and the industry to help counter food supply chain threats. He mentioned how the food chain has changed significantly over the last 50 years for Mars, moving from domestic sources to a global food chain, and even they form of the ingredients has changed. All of this required changes to their approach on food safety. Margaret Saunders, Homeland Security Director, Oak Ridge National Lab also said food safety is important to homeland security
The interesting thing about this forum was the consensus among all the speakers and the audience about the need for a system to provide better traceability of our food supply and the ingredients that go into the food. Is better record keeping needed throughout the lifecycle? Yes. Can information technology help? Undoubtedly.
You can get more information about Cultivating a Smarter Food Supply at the Smarter Planet blog and follow them @ibmfoodDC on Twitter.
