Food poisoning outbreaks could prove a boon to RFID

Computerworld - Recent national outbreaks of E.coli and salmonella poisoning are likely to prompt government mandates requiring that food products be tracked throughout their life cycles — and that could prove to be a boon for radio frequency identification technologies.

The new mandates would come just as other first-generation track-and-trace tools start to spread through the pharmaceutical industry, which was the first to face such government mandates, analysts said.

So far, bar-code systems and pen-and-paper processes are the most popular drug-tracking tools, but observers expect RFID to emerge as the long-term technology of choice in both the pharmaceutical and food industries.

Roy Wildeman, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., suggested that the advantages of RFID — such as ease of use, the ability to track individual products packed in crates and the ability to scan from significant distances — have so far been overshadowed by the technology's high price tag.

According to a Forrester study, a multibillion-dollar manufacturer can expect to spend $2 billion to $3 billion in start-up costs to implement RFID.

And once the technology is ready for use, companies face significant annual costs, Wildeman added, noting that the average price of 19 cents per RFID tag could mean that it would cost tens of millions of dollars per year to tag millions of items.

Nonetheless, "I think you'll see a cascading wave of [RFID] adoption in the [pharmaceutical and food and beverage] sectors, especially with growing mandates," Wildeman said. "It will be about public sentiment about food-related illnesses. I think that will bring pressure for the government to take action."

Impetus for change

Paul Chang, worldwide lead for business strategy for emerging technology at IBM, said the recent food-poisoning incidents, along with improvements in RFID technology, make 2009 "the year for traceability. It's the perfect storm for RFID — feasibility of the technology, industry adoption and the increased need for tracking the movement of goods."

Those incidents include a salmonella outbreak between April and early August of last year that infected nearly 1,500 people in 43 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The food-borne outbreak caused 286 people to be hospitalized, and it's listed as the possible cause of two deaths, the CDC said.

And a 2006 E.coli outbreak that was eventually linked to contaminated spinach caused 205 confirmed illnesses and three deaths, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

In statements, the FDA said its investigators were unable to determine the origin of the contamination, despite the use of product codes and the gathering of bacterial DNA from the bags the spinach was packed in.