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Recalls Point to Need for Better Fresh Produce Traceability

Posted on: Monday, 11 June 2007, 06:00 CDT

OMAHA, Neb., June 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The FDA is receiving plenty of criticism for holes in the U.S. food safety system. The expanding number of food recalls, as well as last year's spinach recall due to an E. coli outbreak, point out the need for food growers and suppliers to be able to immediately trace their product back to the point of contamination. In many cases, sales of products outside of those contaminated suffered because buyers were unsure of which products were safe and which were not.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 76 million Americans get sick and 5,000 people die from food-borne illnesses each year. Those outbreaks have taken a toll on the consumers' confidence in the nation's food supply, as well as point to the need to quickly trace products from the grocer's shelf back through the supply chain.

"With all the recent food recalls, consumer-accessible traceability information has become a necessity," said Dennis Francis, VP label development for Corporate Express Document & Print Management Inc. "A 2007 Food Marketing Institute survey indicated that recent food safety concerns prompted consumers to stop purchasing certain foods. Traceability avoids loss of sales through food safety recalls due to illness outbreaks." Corporate Express' latest offering powered by YottaMark is HarvestMark(TM) (http://www.harvestmark.com/), a food traceability and security solution that tracks and provides trusted and comprehensive data about the specific date and location of harvested food.

"HarvestMark provides traceability for field-packed fresh produce," said Elliott Grant, president and CEO of YottaMark. "The solution is fast, cost-effective, and crucially has no impact on picker productivity. It provides instant traceability that is simple for consumers to use. Importantly, growers can use the real-time intelligence generated by our system to obtain valuable marketing, quality, and consumer behavior information."

In the fall of 2006, grocery stores, sandwich shops and other sellers of spinach and spinach-related foods (e.g., spinach dip) pulled their product from shelves until the E. coli outbreak that killed three people and sickened more than 200 was traced to a small cattle and horse operation on the Central California Coast. Three deaths were attributed to consuming bagged spinach.

"The challenge facing the FDA or state food safety inspectors was dealing with paper-based and inaccessible in-house systems to quickly trace the origins of these tainted products, particularly when the consumer packaging has no traceability information. The speed with which problems can be pinpointed, quarantined and communicated has a dramatic effect on both consumer confidence, and the scope of the impact on innocent growers," said Grant.

FDA Investigators could not make a definitive determination as to how the E. coli contaminated the spinach, but the scare forced supermarkets all over the nation to pull their loose spinach off shelves until the source of the problem was found. The spinach industry in California lost close to $100 million after regulators warned consumers to stop eating bagged spinach.

"Better traceability using a system that pinpoints a product's origin within seconds would enable the FDA to narrow its search quickly, so that the suppliers from other areas wouldn't have needed to pull their products, and lose the resulting revenues and profits," Francis said. "Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags work well on a pallet-level, but those are too costly to employ on products liked bagged spinach."

Grant added, "Growers and producers have to balance the total system cost of any solution with the actual benefits in risk reduction coupled with the perceived benefit of public confidence in their brand. They need a system that is priced appropriately and has zero impact on labor in the field. The advantage of HarvestMark is that it provides instant traceability via a cell phone or the web, and because it is a hosted solution, requires no IT infrastructure to be added by growers."

Francis noted that the recent produce recalls are just the latest large-scale examples of the need for a traceability solution hosted by a trusted third party for reliability of both the information and easy consumer access to that information.

About Corporate Express

Corporate Express Document & Print Management (CEDPM) is a leading provider of document and print management, and business form, label, direct mail and fulfillment solutions. Employing approximately 1,000 people in eight manufacturing plants and 50 sales offices nationwide, CEDPM is a business unit of Corporate Express US Inc.

Corporate Express provides customers with a single source of business products and services, so that they can focus their resources, energy and time on their core business. Corporate Express helps organizations to save time and maximize their productivity.

Headquartered in the Netherlands, Corporate Express generated 2006 annual sales of EUR 6.3 billion. The Company has a widespread global distribution network spanning North America, Europe and Australia, has close to 19,000 employees, and operations in 20 countries. Corporate Express is listed on Euronext Amsterdam (Euronext: CXP) and in New York . For more information, please visit http://www.corporateexpress.com/ or call 1-800-622-3676.

About YottaMark

YottaMark, Inc. is a privately held technology company, based in Redwood City, CA. YottaMark is a leader in secure unit-level identification systems, providing brand protection solutions to diverse industries including fresh food, electronics, automotive, healthcare and consumer goods. Visit YottaMark at http://www.yottamark.com/ or call 1-866-76-TRUST (87878).

Corporate Express Document & Print Management

CONTACT: Shelli Ryan, APR of Ad Hoc Communication Resources,+1-402-572-6510, Shelli@AdHocCR.com, for Corporate Express Document & PrintManagement

Web site: http://www.corporateexpress.com/http://www.yottamark.com/http://www.harvestmark.com/

Source: PRNewswire-FirstCall

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