Keeping it fresh

Jun 1, 2011 12:00 AM, By Merrill Douglas

New laws and regulations are putting increased pressure on food and pharmaceutical companies to ensure the integrity of their products.

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Companies that sell food and drugs in the United States face increasing pressure to improve control over their supply chains. One source of that pressure is the federal Food Safety and Modernization Act, which was signed into law last January. This legislation instructs the Food and Drug Administration to focus more on preventing food contamination, rather than simply responding to incidents after the fact. That means food will undergo more inspections as it moves from producer to consumer.

Meanwhile, drug companies soon will face new requirements for tracking and tracing their products. The FDA still is developing those rules and has not yet said when they will kick in. But starting in 2015, the state of California will require vendors to provide item-level electronic pedigrees for half the pharmaceuticals they ship into the state.

Partly in response to new regulation, and partly to address long-standing concerns about safety and shelf life, technology vendors are promoting solutions for monitoring food and pharmaceuticals during distribution.

For instance, Intelleflex of Santa Clara, Calif., offers a system based on radio-frequency identification technology that is designed to identify problems with perishable product in transit.

Combining a temperature sensor with a battery-assisted semi-passive (Class 3) RFID tag — which is affixed to a pallet or other conveyance — the Intelleflex solution continuously records a product’s temperature, creating a history of up to 3,600 time-stamped data points. At any point along the supply chain, a company can use an RFID reader to capture the product’s temperature history. Based on that, the remaining shelf life can be determined.

“If you do that at the pallet level, we believe — and studies from the Universities of Florida and Arkansas and Georgia Tech have shown — you can recover a good amount of what is disposed of today,” said Peter Mehring, the company’s chief executive officer.

The tag also can capture a time-stamped identification number from each device that reads it, which creates a record of the product’s physical progress. So if a problem arises — for example, if a pallet-load of beef becomes too warm — it’s easy to discover where the anomaly occurred, Mehring said. “And then you can also say who should have known about the problem, because they actually read the data off the tag.”

The Hawaii State Department of Agriculture recently used Intelleflex’s technology in a pilot project funded largely by the vendor and Global Tracking Systems, a Taiwanese vendor of plastic pallets. The project tracked the condition of boxed produce loaded onto 100 pallets as they moved among distribution centers belonging to Honolulu-based Armstrong Produce.

Workers used Motorola 9090G handheld computers to read bar codes on the boxes and the RFID tags on the pallets, in order to track the produce from warehouse to truck to airport, on and off the plane, onto another truck and into a second warehouse.

“That gives us RFID traceability on the boxes, but also on the pallet and the temperatures,” said John Ryan, the state agriculture department’s administrator for quality assurance, speaking in advance of the trial, which was scheduled for early May.

The system that was to be used in the trial features a cloud-based application that stores and displays the data collected from the readers. “This will allow the people at Armstrong Produce to look at temperature profiles as well as time between drop-off and pickup, how long they sit on the tarmac and all that,” Ryan said.

Intelleflex also markets its technology for tracking the condition of biopharmaceuticals. “They need to be maintained at 5 degrees Centigrade, plus or minus three, otherwise they may lose their efficacy, or maybe even turn dangerous,” Mehring said. The Class 3 RFID tag is particularly effective for this application, because it can send and receive signals through objects with a high-water content, such as the biopharmaceuticals themselves, or the liquid-filled coolers used to transport them, he said.