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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

traceability

This Company is Using Baker’s Yeast to Create Invisible Barcodes That Track Food Through the Supply Chain

In a world where food-borne illnesses and food fraud are happening at ever-greater frequencies, tracking food provenance through the supply chain is becoming increasingly critical. The challenge, however, is that the further an ingredient travels from the farm to our plate, the harder it becomes to determine where it came from.

Enter the barcode made from baker’s yeast. A company out of Canada named Index Biosystems has developed a way to use nothing more than the single-cell microorganism and water – combined with its proprietary tracking software – to trace the point of origin for pretty much any type of food product.

According to Index, the company can create a BioTag – the company’s name for its baker’s yeast barcode – by mixing baker’s yeast in extremely trace with water, then spraying or misting it onto a product such as wheat. The spray equipment that applies the water/BioTag mixture varies, but Index says it’s usually just a simple nozzle. The company says that BioTags are incredibly sticky once applied and remain attached to the surface of the grains, withstanding the milling process while remaining detectable in flour. To detect the BioTag, the company or one of its customers uses molecular detection techniques such as PCR and DNA sequencing (because the “bar code” is essentially the unique DNA sequence of the baker’s yeast).

According to Index’s CEO Mike Borg, the company’s technology only needs a small sample of flour – a metric gram – to determine every farm involved in producing the wheat that made that flour. He says that with the company’s BioTags and GS1 standards, they can verify the carbon footprint of a slice of bread.

Borg says that because the BioTag does not involve any genetic modification, the company has already received approval for using the tags in food products from the U.S. FDA and Health Canada. He also says the platform has been proven across various products ranging from commodities to pharmaceuticals.

The challenge of food traceability has been one of the biggest focuses in the food industry in recent years, leading to various approaches, such as NFTs for cattle to digestible food sensors. But by using a DNA-based tracking approach using something as simple as baker’s yeast, Index has essentially taken the bar code concept and integrated it into the food itself.

Could Blockchain Solve the Fishy Problems Surrounding Seafood Accountability?

When you buy fish, do you have confidence that what you’ve purchased is as advertised at the point of purchase? According to the state attorney general’s office in New York, there is a good likelihood that what you’ve purchased is not even the same species as the one specified on the label. There could be a very promising solution to what the attorney general’s office calls “rampant” seafood mislabeling, though: blockchain technology.

The attorney general’s office purchased fish from 155 stores across 29 supermarket brands throughout the state, and then sent them to a lab for testing. A remarkable number of the specimens—more than one in every four, or 27%—were not what the supermarkets said they were. The complete results of the experiment are found here, with this conclusion:

“While mislabeling affected virtually every tested seafood category, there was rampant mislabeling of certain species. The results suggest that consumers who buy lemon sole, red snapper, and grouper are more likely to receive an entirely different fish. Similarly, consumers who bought what was advertised as ‘wild’ salmon often actually received farm-raised salmon instead. Such consumers had often paid more money—on average 34% more—to avoid farm raised fish.”

The report also notes that in many cases, consumers are getting fish that is less sustainably raised than claimed, and in some cases, they are unknowingly buying types of fish that can cause gastrointestinal problems. In addition, according to an article by Forbes, a report conducted between 2010 and 2012 by a marine surveying organization, Oceana, identified that as many as one in three seafood products in the United States were incorrectly labeled. Needless to say, a solution is needed, and pronto.

Enter blockchain. The disruptive new technology promises to make traditional paper ledger-based transactions obsolete, replaced by digital ledgers, and it also promises to guarantee more accountability and trust in the food supply chain. Headlines abound heralding how blockchain technology will revolutionize financial services markets, which remain burdened by unwieldy paper trails and costly proprietary software applications. Not everyone realizes, though, the move toward developing blockchain has direct roots in the erosion of trust that grew as the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 exploded around the globe.

Blockchain allows people to record transactions securely via a decentralized platform without a lot of intermediaries. Because of the advantages it can bring to the process of tracing food sources, it may also be a big part of the answer in fighting fish fraud.

According to Forbes: “Some companies are already using blockchain technology to track their supply chain – for example, an initiative called Tuna on the Blockchain provides a provenance system so that you will know where you tuna comes from. Back in late 2016 it was reported that a British-based start-up called Provenance went out to Indonesia and tested tracking tuna on the blockchain.”

There are a number of corporate and legislative proposals in motion, which could require detailed seafood product labeling. Legit Fish is a Boston-based company that is dedicated to improving the traceability and verification of seafood products. The company has developed a seafood traceability database that compares confidential data from supply chain participants to landings data collected by the government in order to provide seafood dealers, processors, retailers, and their customers a solid verification of each individual lot of product that has been transacted.  As this story notes, Legit Fish is working with companies such as BASE that are integrating seafood traceability solutions with blockchain.

At a meetup that The Spoon held in July, blockchain was very much on the minds of fishermen in attendance. They see blockchain as a way to not only prove provenance, but also to help them from getting unfair blame for fraudulent acts that take place down the fish delivery chain. Recently, we wrote about how blockchain technology could have helped quickly mitigate the crisis involving E.coli and Romaine lettuce in California. In a similar way, by providing better sourcing information and, importantly, more open food sourcing information, blockchain could make fish fraud much tougher to pull off than it is now.

At a 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit panel, executives from ripe.io and Walmart discussed the promise of blockchain in the food industry, food safety, and which groups of people need to get connected for blockchain solutions to work. Watch the video to hear the whole conversation.

You Are What You Eat. Augmented Transparency Can Tell You Exactly What That Is

We hear the refrain “consumers want transparency” a lot these days. As we grow more and more conscientious about where our products come from and what went into making them, brands are under increasing pressure to offer up the kind of “insider” information no one would have even thought to demand 20 years ago.

That demand’s perhaps loudest in the food industry. In a 2016 study, 94 percent of respondents said it was important for food-manufacturing brands to be transparent about what’s in their food and how it’s made. And 83 percent of said access to more extensive product information would be “valuable.”

Driving many of the efforts to provide this level of transparency is something called augmented transparency (AT). Though a bit of a nebulous of a term, AT is technology—often a group of technologies working together—that gives us more in-depth information about our food: what’s in it, where it comes from, the resources used to produce it, and so on. The hope of many is that AT will use multiple channels (apps, websites, QR codes, etc.) to deliver expert information to consumers about what they eat. Think of it as a “behind-the-scenes” look at your food.

Timing-wise, there’s enormous need for this. The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) has a long history of fighting transparency. As a result, consumer trust in these brands is weak. And, from a practical standpoint, there’s limited space on, say, a box of cereal to fit ingredients, allergens, and other nutrition information, never mind information about sourcing and supply chain.

AT and the companies experimenting with it may not solve these problems overnight with a single solution. But a number of folks are making some promising headway:

Chicken of the Sea. Head to the company’s traceability website and you can track the production journey of your tuna by entering the number found on the bottom of each can. The rationale here is to make transparent every step of the manufacturing process, including the legality of the fishing vessels and treatment of the workers. To that end, the traceability website includes information about the species, methods used to catch it, where it was processed and canned, and a glimpse at Chicken of the Sea’s sustainability policies and progress. The company wants to make such transparency available for its entire shelf line at some point in the future.

Co-op Italia. This “supermarket of the future,” done in partnership with Accenture, keeps products on interactive tables and smart shelves. When a shopper touches a product, a system powered by Microsoft Kinect sensors will detect the movement and display product information on a nearby screen: nutritional information, allergens, disposal instructions, and related items. Data for cooking suggestions, top-selling items, and other information is processed and displayed in real time around the store. Co-op Italia is betting on this combination of connected devices, personalization, and real-time knowledge to become the norm for grocery stores in the future.

SmartLabels. Not to be confused with “smart labels,” the SmartLabels initiative is the work of Trading Partner Alliance, a group formed by the GMA. Via the app or website, curious shoppers can scan products and get instant access to information about ingredients, allergens, and claims and certifications. It’s expected that 30,000 products will be available to scan by the end of 2017. The idea is great in theory, though it remains to be seen how widespread the technology will become, and how transparent it will actually be. Skepticism over this product has existed since SmartLabel was announced in 2015, and, as noted above, the GMA doesn’t have the cleanest track record when it comes to transparency.

There are some smaller but no less important initiatives at play. Hershey’s A-to-Z glossary of ingredients lists what all those strange, eight-syllable words in processed foods are and what they do. Catelli Brothers, who make veal and lamb products, uses a 24/7 remote-video-monitoring system called Arrowsight to give consumers a view of all livestock-handling procedures. JW West and Companies also keeps cameras to display its animals and their conditions.

Finally, Future + Food coLab was a partnership between Target and the MIT Media Lab. Here, scanners used lightwaves to determine the properties of a food product and provide more information to consumers. Future + Food coLab shut its doors this past June, when Target stepped away and alternative investment couldn’t be found. Nonetheless, it’s worth a mention. The project may be dead, but the technology and ideas are still very much alive. Here’s hoping they make their way to other companies and AT initiatives in the future.