When the folks at Dole Fresh Vegetables, a division of Dole Food Co., Inc., began brainstorming ways to trace fruits and vegetables back to the point of harvest, they had no idea they would be setting a new safety standard in the food industry.
While government traceability regulations require companies to track the raw material stream from the "field to the fork," finding a way to quickly pinpoint exactly where in the field a specific vegetable came from has been next to impossible--until now.
Under the leadership of Steve Robinson, vice president of business process development at Dole Fresh Vegetables, the company devised a way to combine existing technology--scanning equipment, cell phones, RFID tags, and global positioning system (GPS) navigation--to create a harvest management system that follows product bins from the fields through the processing steps, which include weighing, cooling, and cold storage.
Source: Managing Automation, http://www.managingautomation.com