Farm to Fork

According to Wikipedia, Farm-to-table (or farm-to-fork) is a social movement which promotes serving local food, preferably through direct acquisition from the producer. This might be accomplished by a direct sales relationship, a community-supported agriculture arrangement, a farmer’s market, a local distributor or by the restaurant or school growing its own food. Farm-to-table often incorporates a form of food traceability (“knowing where your food comes from”) where the origin of the food is identified to consumers. Often restaurants cannot source all the food they need for dishes locally, so only some dishes or only some ingredients are labelled as local.

The farm-to-table movement has arisen more or less concurrently with changes in attitudes about food safety, food freshness, food seasonality, and small-farm economics. As Rutgers puts it, farm to fork is “a food system in which food production, processing, distribution, and consumption are integrated to enhance the environmental, economic, social and nutritional health of a particular place.” While most of us see the term used in restaurants, it can be applied much more broadly than that.

Today food manufacturers need to identify and track every ingredient for each one of their products from the supplier, through processing, packaging, distribution and to the consumer location.  Did you know that 87 million people suffer from food poisoning each year , and that 371 000 become ill and are hospitalized.  What’s more, approximately 5,700 more die from food related illnesses. Food recalls can be very costly and vary from $47 million to $1 billion.

MITAS’ diverse portfolio of businesses provide the most comprehensive range of solutions offered around the world.  Our Farm to Fork solutions help farmers monitor and control the environmental conditions produce goes through from planting, all the way to the consumer.  Making use of specifically designed sensors, they can ensure the perfect soil conditions for planting, and can record and receive real time reporting throughout the growing process of the produce. Ultimately monitoring the six main areas of farming such as soil, machinery, water, weather, chemicals and the crops themselves, as well as automating processes, such as irrigation based on the IoT sensor data.  The equipment can also encompass predictive information such as weather forecasting.

At the time of harvesting, the combination data recorded can be used to start the historical visible or batch traceability of the produce. Currently fresh produce is batch identified with a movement for serialized products to GS1 SGTIN standards.  Distribution and processing sectors can also be aided by the direct marking onto the fresh produce using either laser or UV edible inks, which will eliminate the cost of labeling individual items or boxes and add a much-needed layer of security.

The effectiveness of the produce wash process can be validated, verified, and monitored within 15 minutes using our SaniTracers which are non-living, food-safe, DNA-tagged particles, engineered to behave like pathogens during produce wash, or aid in tracing the food and not the packaging by verifying the provenance for fresh produce, liquid and dry goods anytime, anywhere for traceability and adulteration detection.