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.
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