Supply Chain Technologies for the Food Sector

¶ … Supply Chain Technology in the Food Industry In the past few years, manufactured food stuffs have become important parts of the diet of many individuals across the globe. This trend has been fueled by changes in eating habits that incorporate a combination of local produce and imported food stuffs. As manufactured goods continue to be important elements in many individuals' diets, the development of sustainable food supply chains has become a major issue.

The significance of this issue is particularly fueled by the need to ensure the safety and health of food stuffs given that they incorporate both local produce and internationally conserved food items. Actually, the food industry has experienced the development and increased use of supply chain technologies that are geared towards enhancing the safety and health of food stuffs in business across the world. These supply chain technologies are also utilized by retail businesses in the food industry, especially with increased focus on nutrition and health.

Wal-Mart is one of the retail businesses that utilize supply chain technologies to ensure safe and healthy food stuffs across all its stores. One of the cool supply chain technologies utilized by Wal-Mart to promote food safety and health is The Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI), which has in the recent past obtained significant traction among major food retailers in America. This technology is basically an industry-led initiative that focuses on improving traceability of food items throughout the whole produce supply chain.

In essence, the initiative was developed and adopted in order to ensure electronic traceability of every fresh produced provided to consumers (Freed, 2013). Through the use of standard identification, PTI supply chain technology enables members of the supply chain for the produce to easily obtain, scan, and register data encrypted in the barcode. This helps in enhancing the safety and health of food stuffs by making it easy to recall food items that could generate significant health impacts on consumers as well as considerable business risk.

As evident in Wal-Mart's scenario, the implementation of this supply chain technology requires the use of rightprinting solution for case identification by producers and packagers. This supply chain technology for the food industry was developed because foodservice and retail markets obtain fresh food items from many suppliers with different kinds of information and formatting. The maintenance of the health and safety of these food products was relatively difficult because of the lack of case identification that could promote easy product recall to lessen or eliminate any human and business risk.

The Produce Traceability Initiative deals with this problem through providing standards for case identification that helps in ensuring the safety and health of food items and/or products. Wal-Mart's adoption of this supply chain technology in the food industry was based on its focus on providing high-quality food products and items to its customers in a safe and healthy manner.

Since 2013, the retail business has ensured all suppliers use PTI-compliant labels or trademarks for all shipments of food products else their deliveries would be considered out of specifications upon receipt (Kane, 2013). This has not only contributed to transformation of suppliers' labeling processes but also enabled Wal-Mart to trace each of.