Agricultural supply system traceability, Part II: Implications of packhouse processing transformations

Traceability in Postharvest Systems

“…If it is not possible to reverse engineer such a system if requirements change in the future, it is useful to consider designing traceability systems at fine granularity IUs with built in tolerances. Riden and Bollen (2007) have also introduced the concept of purity for postharvest system traceability. Purity is an alternative way to consider tolerance.…”

“…By tripling the size of the input unit (essentially a bin trailer with three bins) the ratio was improved to 2.0 "triples" per pack (14,400 fruit), but precision was reduced as tripling the size of the input unit did not result in tripling the ratio. At the level of the IU of a production run Riden and Bollen (2007) estimated a traceability precision to only 136,800 fruit. It is useful, therefore, to trace with a fine level of granularity as this improves the potential precision of system traceability.…”

“…Riden and Bollen (2007) defined the magnitude of a tracing activity as the number of input units that might potentially belong to each output unit from any segment of the supply chain, which can be stated as, "how many input units need to be found that directly link with a particular output unit of interest?" At the level of a batch it would be all batches associated with a particular pallet.…”

“…At the level of a batch it would be all batches associated with a particular pallet. For the apple packinghouse studied by Riden and Bollen (2007), tracing precision was measured as the ratio of input bins per output pack. Packs with an uncommon fruit size (large or small fruit) were found to be supplied by fruit from six to 13 bins and that the amount of in-feed mixing had little effect on this ratio.…”

A model and prototype implementation for tracking and tracing agricultural batch products along the food chain

“…The model was based in extensible Markup Language (XML) Schemas technology. Bollen, Riden, and Cox (2007) and Riden and Bollen (2007), studied and analyzed the traceability in fruit supply chains in order to improve the traceability control of the batches, concluding that there is potential to implement high precision and fine granularity traceability in agricultural supply systems, which can also meet a number of other purposes such as improved feedback to producers and benefits to supply system efficiency, as well as being acceptable for compliance purposes. Serrano, Jiménez-Hornero, Gutiérrez de Ravé, and Jodral (2008) show how georreferenced data from Geographical Information Systems (GIS) can improve the traceability control of high quality honey, creating a open source code-based GIS web site was which fulfills the needs of characterizing the honeys.…”