Researchers at Colorado State University are exploring ways to build up traceability in the supply chain to improve sustainability, efficiency, and competitiveness in the food industry. Their work tracking the movement of raw materials on their journey to becoming our everyday foods could eventually inform business operations and government policy across a number of sectors.

Traceability broadly refers to the ability to track and trace items backwards. For food, that means illuminating the path backwards from the retail shelf to the original manufacturer, to the ingredient supplier, and on down back to their suppliers. Consumers, producers and governments are increasingly interested in that type of information chain to support food safety efforts or offer better transparency into claims about the sustainability of growing operations, for example. The work could also be used to identify food waste or ensure organic produce really was grown under appropriate regulations.

Systems Engineering Professor Steve Simske recently co-authored a report in Food Safety Magazine outlining how the concept is changing that industry. The article provides a high-level analysis that explores how traceability and emerging technologies could be used for issues around provenance, efficiency and global trade facilitation in the food industry while also outlining potential policy barriers.

He said that while food was a pressing topic in traceability, the research is essentially looking at how networks of information are accessed and how the potential misalignments present between them can be identified or addressed with emerging technologies such as blockchain and bluetooth. That makes the research broadly applicable across many instances in the supply chain beyond just food.

“We are talking about ways to leverage the grocery store’s barcode system as one network versus the manufacturer’s database on who provided what ingredients as another network, for example,” he said. “Getting those systems to talk to each other would provide transparency and visibility for everyone involved in a variety of useful ways. It is essentially a form of multi-factor authentication – like we see on cell phones with passwords – that is already occurring in these spaces and would allow for review to fight counterfeiting or minimize waste along the way.”