Several times each year, the nation faces a widespread, food borne illness crisis. But there’s an easy, cheap technological solution that could stop scares and outbreaks in their tracks.
A relatively simple system of QR codes – those funny-looking, two-dimensional barcodes you see everywhere today — could instantaneously link a product sold on store shelves back to the farm where it was grown or raised with a snap of a smartphone camera. It would no longer take days or weeks to determine what food is safe and what isn’t.
The system could even prevent the contaminated food from reaching store shelves in the first place.
IBM (IBM, Fortune 500) has developed a technology called the InfoSphere Traceability Server, which assigns unique barcodes to every step of the food distribution chain.
The farms, slaughterhouses, food palates, shipping containers, trucks, grocery stores and individual products that are using InfoSphere are all affixed with QR codes and tracked. Even specific animals are being tagged and scanned, so you could find out which specific cow your milk came from or which pig became your pork.
To read the full story: CNN Money
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How do you bar code a cow?
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