Traceability is a major component of food safety, and the fresh produce industry is readying for implementation of the Food Traceability Final Rule, a part of the Food Safety Modernization Act that with a compliance date of Jan. 20, 2026.
Within traceability is the need for collecting and sharing of data. It’s this intersection of food safety and data that Frank Yiannas, a former Food and Drug Administration deputy commissioner of food policy and response and strategic adviser to Wiliot, and Steve Statler, chief marketing officer and head of food safety with Wiliot — a cloud-based, machine-learning platform — talk about in this episode of The Packer’s “Tip of the Iceberg” podcast.
Yiannis played an instrumental role in the FDA’s development of FSMA and the food traceability rule. He said these rules are to ensure trust in the fresh produce industry, not fear.
“One of the things we wanted to do is convey to the American people [that] we want them to eat more produce, not less,” he said. “Produce plays an extremely important part of an overall healthy diet. … One produce outbreak is one too many philosophically.”
Yiannis said that while traceability seems like it is a reactive measure, the end goal of traceability is the prevention of loss — of lives, livelihoods and produce.
“When the outbreaks happen, epidemiologists will say we’ve linked them to a certain produce item that we know people that are becoming ill have been consuming, but all too often we weren’t able to identify what was the source of that produce, and as a result we’ve had to do these overly broad consumer advisories that weren’t good for anything; they didn’t improve public health and certainly destroyed the livelihoods of people that were unaffected.”
Yiannis said with improved traceability, recalled produce will be removed more quickly from the supply chain.
“If you’re having an outbreak, [by] being able to trace that back to the source quickly and remove that contaminated product from the marketplace, you prevent additional people from getting sick,” he said.
Statler agrees, saying that as more of the produce supply chain is traced, he’s noticed how many gaps in the information there are.
“We’ve been running the food chain in the dark, and so there’s so many issues around how food is handled that we kind of hope everything’s OK,” he said. “When we start connecting all these food containers to the internet, we see there’s an epidemic of handling issues and produce not flowing through in a logical sequence, certain products getting stuck at the back of a packing shed or back of a [distribution center] or at the back of a store.”
Statler said this is where automation can help solve some of these issues while improving both operations and food quality.
“I hope one of the messages that will come out of this [podcast] is we have to do food safety, but when we do it, we have the opportunity to add the level of automation that can help solve these other problems, which means better-quality food and more profitable operations,” he said.
Yiannis says another misconception those in the produce industry might have about traceability is that it will be a costly and difficult endeavor, to which he said, “There are simple ways to comply if you’re willing to entertain creative ways and how to do it.”
Yiannis points to the FDA’s Regulatory Impact Analysis, which says traceability will save the produce industry significant amounts of money through more efficient recalls.
“When you prevent these unnecessarily broad recalls that have cost the produce industry hundreds of millions of dollars, when you prevent illnesses that result in people not being able to go to work or hospital expenses and even tragically death, there’s savings,” he said. “Food traceability actually saves the food system money on food safety alone.”
Statler says the traceability rule calls for shipping and receiving events to help those in the produce industry keep track of inventory in a more seamless way. And it’s where technology, whether it’s an RFID scanner or Wiliot’s Pixel tag, can add efficiency and accuracy to this process.
“What we’re seeing is there is a significant difference between the theory of what’s been shipped and the reality of what’s been received,” Statler said. “If you’re in the food business, you need to think about having a visibility platform, and then once you’ve got that platform, then FSMA 204 is just an app that can sit alongside the store operations application, the omnichannel application, the temperature compliance application.”
Watch the full interview by clicking the video player above.
