In a USA TODAY article by Elizabeth Weise titled FDA adds up to 100 labs to help trace salmonella outbreak

In a USA TODAY article by Elizabeth Weise titled FDA adds up to 100 labs to help trace salmonella outbreak, David Acheson the FDA?s associate commissioner for foods posed a question as to whether pushing the food industry to move to computerized record keeping might speed investigations in the future. He went on to say ?In a digital age should we still be using paper and pencil to try to figure things out??

In the same article. Jean Halloran of Consumers Union called on congress to mandate traceability of fruits and vegetables back to their source.

We agree with both David Acheson and Jean Halloran. We would go one step further and suggest that all products have this level of traceability regardless if they are consumables or not.

Our company SafeSourcing Inc. www.safesourcing.com was launched on 5/12/2008 and is focused on safety and traceability in the retail supply chain. We can easily tell you how many farms there are in Mexico that process fruits, or how many meat processing plants there are in Nebraska in an instant with contact information. Our daily blog has a lot to do with safety in procurement and three blogs recently have dealt with the salmonella outbreak.

Part of what SafeSourcing does when providing data to retailers relative to their current suppliers or alternate sources of supply is to provide traceability content to the original source. While some of that work today requires paper, pencil and phone related work; once information is obtained it is included in our database for future reference. Think of it as a traceability RFI tool on demand for retailers. Our database presently contains over 187,000 North American suppliers and 26 targeted safety and eco focused certifications.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with one footstep. We look forward to your comments.

Ron