February 15, 2016

By Elizabeth Penney

What’s your chance of getting food poisoning in any given year? According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, one in six. In the United States, that’s 48 million people annually who become ill after eating. Around 3,000 die.

The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) passed in 2011, with rulemaking final in 2016, seeks to address food-borne illness through prevention, inspection, and recall authority. Under the oversight of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the new rules have major implications for so-called high-risk food, including fresh produce. In fact, produce is believed to be such a risk that it was awarded its own set of requirements, called the Produce Safety Rule. Generally aimed at fruits and vegetables commonly eaten raw, the most potentially perilous foods include fresh greens, tomatoes, sprouts, and berries, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest. One of the law’s requirements is the ability to trace produce back to the farm where it was grown.

This is where Nathan Dorn’s Salinas, California-based start-up, Food Origins, comes in. “We supply precision data to high-value hand-picked crops,” he says. The requirement for traceability is the element that spurred Dorn’s development of an integrated data collection system. He found that traceability is often tacked on to existing agricultural data programs. “The same data set is collected multiple times,” he notes, “and systems are never merged.” 

Dorn, a consultant to the California berry industry, has seen first-hand what’s available since he helps farms identify and choose technology. While large growers already have food tracking systems in place, FSMA is impacting smaller growers. The size of farms affected was one of the most hotly debated provisions in the Act. Farms with average annual revenues of $25,000 or less during the past three years are exempt entirely.

For those with average revenues of $500,000 or less over the past three years, qualified exemptions and modified requirements are available. However, labeling the produce with farm of origin or at point of sale is always required for these farmers.

Dorn’s thought is, since information has to be gathered, why not use it to improve farm production and profitability? With high-value crops such as fruit and berries, he makes the point that farmer decisions have big dollar consequences, even at the acre level. Thus, Food Origins will map fields by the block so that all activities can be tracked. In order to understand and improve productivity, tracking information about plants or trees transplanted in the field will be entered. This will allow farmers who use various nursery sources to compare performance.

“We’re hoping to do this much less expensively for farmers than the systems that presently exist,” Dorn said. “We’ve yet to see an opportunity for incremental revenue offered by traceability applications. We hope to provide that.”

During the growing season, the system will help with field management and yield prediction. At harvest, pickers will use hand-held devices to record crop information.

“Many crops are harvested directly into the containers sold to consumers,” Dorn says, and this is a key facet of tying traceability to the exact location where produce was grown. Each container has a unique code that can be used for multiple purposes.

The data will include employee information so can it be tied into payroll systems. Worker productivity can be tracked in real-time and employees shifted to other areas of the farm as needed.

Once it leaves the farm, the crop can be traced through the various links in the supply chain, all the way to the end user, the consumer. In addition to meeting legal requirements for food tracing, Dorn sees an opportunity to “connect with the consumer.” Digital coding will allow the consumer to access information about where, when, and by whom produce was harvested. “We have to make data interesting to consumers,” he says.

Food Origins’ partnerships—both national and international—give Dorn confidence that the software will launch successfully next year. Full-scale trials will occur in the summer of 2016.