Only Houstonians Who Eat Should Care About Traceability

By Henri Morris
Houston

“I wish those West Coast vegetable gardeners would get their act together.” I overheard one shopper say this to another a couple of days ago as I waited in a checkout line at a grocery store in my suburban Houston neighborhood.

Shaking a bag of salad mix in his hand, this man was responding to the most recent California lettuce recall, the second over the past two weeks – and the third in the space of a year since the largest investigation into a foodborne illness in U.S. history triggered the discovery that bagged spinach contaminated with E. coli had killed at least three people and sickened more than 200.

He has my sympathy. The stories about people poisoned innocently from eating a simple salad are chilling, and he is right to worry. In a city where four million mouths feed off the bounty from thousands of restaurants and supermarkets, the only Houstonians who shouldn’t take this food fight personally are the ones who don’t eat.

Even so, I can’t agree with him that the West Coast vegetable growers are the only bogeymen threatening our food safety. There are plenty more lurking beyond the spinach fields of California. Some look scarier than others, but all combine to make what most of us believe to be the safest food supply in the world a catastrophe waiting to happen.

The numbers are unsettling. According to the Centers for Disease Control, foodborne diseases cause approximately 76 million illnesses, 325 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths in the U.S. each year.

This prompts the questions: With all of the food safety problems of the last year, has the food supply chain learned its lessons? Is state-of-the art traceability in place to protect leafy greens from the ground to the mouth? Sometimes yes, but more often than not the answer is no.

With so much focus on the lettuce fields of Salinas County, many of us believe there is a gaping hole overlooked in the quest for food safety. Jim Prevor, the Florida-based pundit and editor of Produce Business magazine, a man who unabashedly eyeballs every twist and wiggle of our industry in his daily blog, points a finger – not at the growers, packers and processors – but at the local distributors and retail distribution centers. Wholesale food distributors are the crucial links in the food supply chain who provide our grocery stores, restaurants, schools and hospitals with perishable food.

“Many products lose their unique identity – and thus their traceability – when they get slotted at foodservice distributors or at retail warehouses,” he says. This means spring mix from Grower A can be commingled with spring mix from Grower B, C and D at the time of sale. Then, when E. coli rears its ugly head, the distributor is at a loss to determine the offending food’s origin.

So what happens? Even though only one grower may be at fault, the Food and Drug Administration doesn’t know which one, so the chaos and shame of recall is visited on all four.

This is the 21st century and we put a man on the moon decades ago, so why can’t we track a sick bag of lettuce with the same speed that Fed X tracks a lost package? The fact is, we can. The technology exists today to barcode and RFID-scan leafy greens, pears, apples and other fresh produce, just the same as a box of crackers or a jar of peanut butter (When was the last time you worried about the danger of foodborne pathogens lingering in a new jar of peanut butter?). Regrettably, it is mostly the mega-sized produce distributors who are putting expert tracking technology to use.

Yes, there are exemplary mom and pop operations who take pride in making new technology an integral part of the way they conduct business, but they are not typical. To most of the estimated 78,000 U.S. food distributors, traceability still means cursory food inspections and best-guess hunches. And unfortunately, it is these small wholesale distributors who are the ultimate suppliers of most of the fresh produce consumed in this country. Their outdated, albeit well-intentioned, tracking strategies are unacceptable in today’s world.

Even so, there’s hope – and some of it will be demonstrated in Houston next week at the Fresh Summit Expo 2007, an international conference and exposition taking place October 12-15 at the George R. Brown Convention Center. Here, wholesale produce distributors from all over the world will get information on the newest methods of tracing a bag of salad from the grower’s field to the family’s table. With 17,000 fresh produce pros expected to attend, you can bet the subject of traceability, and how best to achieve it, will be one of the hottest topics on the agenda. We know we’ve can do more to keep pathogen-infested produce out of the U.S. food supply.

Henri Morris, CPA, is president and chief executive officer of Edible Software, a division of Solid Software, LLC. The Houston-based company develops and distributes accounting software for the wholesale food distribution industry.

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