RFID smart tag for traceability and cold chain monitoring of foods: Demonstration in an intercontinental fresh fish logistic chain

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Abstract

The main objective of this work was the validation of a RFID smart tag developed for real-time traceability and cold chain monitoring for food applications. This RFID based system consists of a smart tag and a commercial reader/writer. The smart tag, attached on the product to be tracked integrates light, temperature and humidity sensors, a microcontroller, a memory chip, low power electronics and an antenna for RFID communications. These sensor logged data can be stored in the memory together with traceability data. A commercial reader/writer was used for reading and writing data on the smart tag, with a wireless reading distance of 10 cm, in real-time at any time of the food chain. The results concerning a demonstration of the system along an intercontinental fresh fish logistic chain are reported here. These results proved that this system presents important advantages regarding conventional traceability tools and currently used temperature data loggers such as more memory, reusability, no human participation, no tag visibility needed for reading, possibility of reading many tags at the same time and more resistance to humidity and environmental conditions.

Introduction

The total amount of seafood consumed is growing due to international sourcing of raw material, advances in food processing technology and healthy properties. In addition, the logistic chain for chilled food is more complex every day: the origin is far away from the destination, involving on board handling in ships, air transport and more intermediate points in the logistic chain. As a consequence, government officials and industry leaders concerned with ensuring food safety and quality, are exploring means to provide more information and control on sourcing, processing and distribution of food products within supply chains and ultimately to the consumers.

Recently established food regulations in different countries, such as the EU directive 178/2002 (European Parliament, 2002), has placed responsibility for ensuring product safety and quality on individual producers, processors and retailers. Moreover, traceability for control of food safety has been singled out as an area where more surveillance and transparency is needed.

There can be found several definitions for traceability, such as “the ability to follow the movement of a food through specified stages of production, processing and distribution” (Codex Alimentarius, 2004), “the ability to trace the history, application or location of that which is under consideration” or “when considering a product, traceability can be related to the origin of materials and parts, the processing history, and the distribution and location of the product after delivery” (International Standardization Organization (ISO)). The EU Regulation 178/2002 describes it as “the ability to trace and follow a food, feed, food-producing animal or substance intended to be, or expected to be incorporated into a food or feed, through all stages of production, processing and distribution”.

Regattieri et al. (2007) recently analyzed legal and regulatory aspects of food traceability. This paper presents also the newest technical instruments for traceability that allow item identification in each step of the chain. These instruments are flexible or rigid tags that follow the item and can be read further down the supply chain. Nowadays the available tools are, mainly, alphanumerical codes, bar code labels and Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags.

The simplest RFID system is a product identification tool that uses a wireless microchip and an antenna in the tag that does not need physical contact or sight positioning (like barcodes) with the reader. The reading phase is very fast and fully automated. It is, thus, a very promising technology for the food sector, because it improves management of perishable foods, as well as tracking and tracing of food quality and safety problems. The main problems related to these technical systems are the tag cost and a lack of standardization, although, prices are going down continuously and efforts for defining standards of operation are being made.

In the case of fresh perishable products, there is also a major requirement for precise temperature monitoring along the complete logistic chain in order to ensure food safety. Current temperature monitoring systems used in the chill chain that can follow the product during storage and transport, like strip chart recorders or temperature dataloggers are usually expensive and not automated, thus requiring manual inspection. Besides, in order to read the temperature information recorded, it is necessary to open the container or package containing the food, and therefore, they can only be read at the final destination. For these reasons, their use is limited only to some parts of the cold chain or to a few type of products, while for other products and important parts of the chain, continuous product temperature monitoring is not completed.

The usual solution implemented by many logistic companies is the use of conventional paper labels for traceability information and a strip chart recorder placed inside two or three marked boxes per shipment to monitor the temperature. The main drawbacks of this current system are the price and the need of opening the box for manual reading.

Recently, several solutions for implementing temperature managed traceability systems using RFID tags with embedded temperature sensors have been reported (Ogasawara and Yamasaki, 2006, Jedermann and Lang, 2007). Moreover, one of the current challenges in smart tags is the integration of chemical sensors onboard of flexible tags (Abad et al., 2007a) to monitor for example the ripening or deterioration gases generated by food products. Within the frame of the GoodFood project (FP6-IST-1-5008774-IP) several RFID tags integrating physical and chemical sensors have been developed.

The aim of this work was to validate a real-time traceability and cold chain monitoring flexible tag developed in the GoodFood project for the food logistic chain integrating temperature and relative humidity sensors with RFID communication capabilities. The results of using this smart tag for online monitoring along a fresh fish logistic chain from South Africa to Europe are presented.

The idea is to enable a future generation of producers and logistic groups to trace the product at any time if needed, and to check the complete history of a certain product. This information may serve to estimate the product freshness or lifetime. As a result, the use of this kind of system will protect the consumers from the consumption of unsafe foods.

Section snippets

RFID systems

The heart of the RFID tracing system developed is a smart tag and a reader/writer module. The smart tag, attached on the product to be tracked, integrates light, temperature and humidity sensors, a microcontroller, a memory chip, low power electronics and an antenna for RFID communications with the reader/writer.

RFID technology in the high frequency (HF) band at 13.56 MHz was considered the best frequency for integration on flexible tags, specially for foods with an important water content.

Laboratory tests

Fig. 5 shows the results obtained in the laboratory tests. Both the rigid and flexible tag prototypes detected the same temperature fluctuations as the commercial datalogger Tiny Tag, during the fast temperature changes (part A of Fig. 5) as well as during the slow changes (part B).

Field tests

Results obtained in the first field tests on the trip from Frankfurt to Vitoria are represented in Fig. 6. The peaks obtained can be correlated with the following travel events: section A of Fig. 6 illustrates the

Conclusions

A RFID smart tag including temperature and relative humidity sensing capabilities was developed for food traceability and cold chain monitoring purposes. The system was demonstrated and validated along an intercontinental fresh fish logistic chain.

The smart tag developed in this work presents important advantages regarding these conventional tools. The main one is that this is an automated system that integrates online traceability data and chill chain conditions monitoring. Moreover, a key

Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the European Commission thought the Project no. FP6-IST-1-508774-IP. The authors wish to thank the collaboration of Mr. J.M. Iriondo, General Manager of Maser Microelectronica, and Mr. J.M. Navajas, General Manager of Decoexsa Perishable Centre.

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