Recently, RedLine Solutions, a produce traceability and inventory management system company, and iFoodDS, a food traceability, quality and food safety software company, announced the companies have integrated RedLine’s MyProduce and iFoodDS Trace Exchange.
The companies say this partnership helps produce suppliers collect, manage and share critical tracking events (CTEs) and key data elements (KDEs) across the supply chain. KDEs and CTEs are an essential part of the FDA’s Final Food Traceability Rule, also known as FSMA 204.
“What our partnership with RedLine does is it alleviates that operational expense, that operational burden, because there are many suppliers, especially produce suppliers, that are already using RedLine Solutions for case and palette labeling or even for their own individual traceability, but they need a broader ability to share that data out with all of their downstream customers,” says Alyson Sharron, vice president of marketing with iFoodDS,
Sharron says this integrated solution helps produce companies better share the information gathered without having to input the data into two different systems.
Todd Baggett, CEO and founder of RedLine Solutions, says the partnership is relatively straightforward. RedLine is the data collection and gathering mechanism, and iFoodDS is the storage mechanism.
RedLine labels cases, identifies what’s on a pallet and where it went.
“They don’t do what we do,” Baggett says. “We don’t do what they do, but we’re meeting in the middle. [iFoodDS’s] place in the market is to really assist the retailers and the large food service companies in retaining that traceability data for the FDA … What we’ve specialized in for the last 25 plus years is data collection, and we’ve had software that manages the data collection and passes it on to ERP or other systems, grower, accounting, etc.”
Baggett says RedLine has tracked its customers’ productivity after integrating its solutions, and in the 20-plus years of business, RedLine saves grower-shippers around 25% in the labor required for storage, picking and shipping processes.
Sharron says the goal of this partnership is to help RedLine and iFoodDS customers share data as easily as possible. And Andy Kennedy, chief traceability officer with iFoodDS, says the value of the data collected by RedLine is so important.
“They understand all the different ways a product can be harvested and come from the field and how that gets tracked inbound,” he says. “So, it looks like a really simple piece of data.”
This simple piece of data is inbound field binds, field harvested products and keeping track of the raw product as it is converted to pack product.
“You need a specialist who really understands the industry, understands the language and can handle all the complexity, and then track that through production, into storage and then outbound,” he says. “[RedLine] does all that work, packages up that shipment record and then sends it to us. So then we have the confidence knowing that the initial packing record has the correct information. It’s got the right field, it’s got the right commodity, variety, etc., and the labeling is good.”
Kennedy says a real risk is that if a label doesn’t scan properly, it defeats the purpose of tracking the produce up to that point.
“The key piece of information that a specialist like RedLine captures, which is so important, is the first critical tracking event,” he says. “It’s really one of the most critical pieces of information in the whole supply chain, because what happens during initial packing? That’s where the harvest information, the fields, where that harvested product actually came from and where it’s being packed gets linked to the case label with the GTEN lot.”
