TraceTracker Tracks Food Safety on the Net

To pinpoint trouble with tainted food, Norway's TraceTracker has a global system that tracks products' ingredients from farm to supermarket

By Jennifer L. Schenker

Talk about an image problem. For weeks, newspapers around the world have carried stories about dairy-poisoned babies—at least six have died, and 300,000 have been sickened—and chronicled how milk, eggs, soy-based foods, and even candy bars containing ingredients from China have been contaminated with melamine (BusinessWeek.com, 10/31/08), an industrial chemical used in plastics and fertilizers.

It's no surprise, then, that the China Daily reported on Dec. 1 that the country's milk exports had plunged by 92% since September, when news about the tainted milk emerged. But the damage doesn't stop there. "It has harmed China's entire food industry," says Ole-Henning Fredriksen, chief executive of Norway's TraceTracker Innovation, which is creating a global information exchange for the food industry. Based in Oslo, TraceTracker is one of 34 companies named on Dec. 4 by the World Economic Forum as tech pioneers—companies offering new technologies or business models that could advance the global economy and enhance peoples' lives.

TraceTracker has developed an online service to identify and track each batch of every product that is merged together in the global food chain, from raw ingredients to products on the supermarket shelf. Its system is aimed at making food safer—and preventing entire industries from being tarnished by the misdeeds of a few.

ChinaTrace

To that end, on Sept. 24 TraceTracker signed an agreement with China's Shandong Institute of Standardization, a government agency, to develop a system called ChinaTrace, to help companies in China's food industry deal with internal traceability, set up third-party verification systems, and connect to a national grid. Foreign trading partners will, in turn, be able to use the database to gain assurances about the origins, freshness, and safety of every ingredient coming from China.

Systems like ChinaTrace aim to protect consumers and help save companies and industries from huge losses. Consider the 1999 case in Belgium, when dioxin was introduced into the food supply through contaminated animal fat used in feeds supplied to farms. Hens, pigs, and cattle ate the contaminated feed, and high levels of dioxin were later found in meat products as well as eggs. The origin of the dioxin contamination remained a mystery for weeks. In the interim, Belgian farmers had to slaughter animals indiscriminately on order of the government, costing them billions of euros. "This is what happens when you don't have a documentation system set up throughout the whole chain," says Fredriksen, 45, an entrepreneur with a master's degree in economics.

He and his business partner, Knut Jorstad, got the idea for TraceTracker in 2000 while doing consulting work for a big food-processing company. "We discovered that all information collected in one step was lost when an ingredient moved to the next step," he says.

That same issue has been plaguing the Chinese food industry. China's dairy product problem could have been solved sooner if every producer had been able go back and look easily, through online documented samplings and analysis, at exactly which batches of milk were contaminated and which companies supplied the ingredients they contained, he says. But many companies in China are still logging information manually. And details about each ingredient remain in information silos, making it difficult to connect the dots.

A Log of Where Every Bite Came From

The Shandong Institute is introducing an electronic system that is being made mandatory by the Chinese government. Although still in early stages, the network is already being used to trace pork products within China. The dairy industry also will be part of ChinaTrace. A central database is being built to use the Internet to connect even the most local Chinese players into the supply chain, says Fredriksen.