Tracking Produce Proves Complex

Another hurdle to faster traceability is what happens to information about products collected by the different players along the distribution chain. Too often, they don't store their data electronically, Fleming said. Investigators in the salmonella outbreak spent the first few weeks chasing suspect tomatoes from produce aisles and restaurants, through wholesalers and distributors, all the way to farms in Florida and Mexico. To get there, they weeded through hundreds of paper records and invoices. They tested 1,700 samples without finding traces of the outbreak.

The Bioterrorism Act of 2002 required food companies, including manufacturers and wholesalers, to record who sent them a product and the next place they shipped it. The one-step-forward and one-step-back rule has improved traceability, but for some lawmakers, it isn't a comprehensive solution.

"The course of this whole investigation shows that our food tracking system is pathetic," said Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), who has introduced legislation to establish a national system for tracing all types of food, not just produce. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has introduced similar legislation but only for meat and poultry products.

Food industry executives representing a broad coalition of growers, distributors, restaurateurs and retailers have been working on a national tracking system since January. Fleming is part of that initiative. They've come up with a solution that centers on a global trade item number or GTIN (pronounced "GEE-tin"). Everyone in the distribution chain would be required to use a bar code encoded with a GTIN and three key pieces of information: the grower or shipper who produced it, the production lot it was part of, and the date it was packed or harvested.

Such information proved invaluable in the 2006 E. coli outbreak in bagged spinach. Each bag carried a bar code that identified where and when it was packed, including the shift that did the work.

Using that information, the FDA was able to move in one day from issuing a blanket warning against bagged fresh spinach to announcing recalls of specific brands. Four weeks later, FDA and California state officials traced the outbreak strain to a specific ranch. They later concluded that wild boars running loose in spinach fields were most likely responsible for contaminating the greens.

If the GTIN system becomes universal, anyone in the supply chain would be able to quickly map out where a box of tomatoes, for example, originated and where it is in real-time -- information that becomes critical when a product needs to be isolated or recalled.

But before that can happen, Fleming said, more details need to be sorted out, such as how long it will be before businesses start using it and how to hold accountable those that don't. Some in the industry estimate it could be two to five years before the GTIN system gains widespread acceptance. The industry coalition is establishing deadlines that businesses would have to meet in adopting it.

Another issue is what role the federal government should play in overseeing such a system. Produce industry leaders such as Stenzel don't think new legislation requiring traceability is necessary. But lawmakers such as DeGette see a publicly run system as a faster, more effective approach.

"Our food distribution in this country now is really a national system, and we saw that clearly with the salmonella outbreak where you're looking across a number of states and into Mexico [for the source]," DeGette said. "If you don't have a national system administered by the Food and Drug Administration, we will still have the breakdowns we are seeing because they won't be coordinated."