Lesson Learned - White Paper from TraceGains - Oct. 16 FDA Meeting

From the Oct. 16 FDA public meeting about traceability, a white paper from TraceGains titled Lessons Learned. An excerpt:

The estimated cost to the U.S. bagged spinach industry for failing to quickly pinpoint the source of E. coli contamination during the fall of 2006 was at least $150 million. That figure didn’t include all costs to counter the extreme adverse publicity regarding California spinach specifically and the U.S. fresh bagged salad industry in general. And it didn’t count the cost of defending against the inevitable class action lawsuits. Would traceability have prevented the outbreak? Probably not. What's certain is that a solid traceability system would have dramatically shortened the investigation and solution cycle for this latest food safety debacle.

Later.....


A good traceability system will be flexible enough to allow for collection of new and/or changing data types. It must be expandable and capable of integrating with other systems, including accounting, back office and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. And it must be able to accommodate new hardware technologies such as RFID, Bluetooth, Zigbee and so forth. The last thing any company should be doing today is getting bogged down in an argument over which auto-identification technology is the best. Each auto-ID technology (barcode, passive RFID, active RFID) has its own strengths and weaknesses and should be evaluated on the basis of cost-effectiveness. What you want to encourage is selecting technology in a way that makes sense. You should avoid at all costs the “all or nothing”
game, in which you choose either full RFID implementation or do nothing. Sometimes it makes sense to roll out a complete system with RFID, but in other instances it makes sense to use existing technology within the facility, such as barcodes, and expand in the future.

Given the spinach debacle, the time for evaluating and implementing traceability systems is upon us – the “waiting and hoping” costs are only rising. We liken the spinach incident to a
high-stakes game of musical chairs—the music stopped, and that time it was the spinach industry's turn to be left standing as the loser. The music has started once again. Who will be left without a chair when it stops again?