What Are the Applications of RFID Technology in the Food Industry?
With the enhancement of people's awareness of food safety, government departments pay more attention to food safety, and the news media expose safety incidents, making food safety problems more and more serious. Food is directly related to people's health. In addition to establishing a series of national standards and industry standards to regulate the process of food production, processing and sales, it is also necessary to adopt high-tech means to manage food safety.
The application of RFID technology to the food industry can effectively ensure the real-time and accuracy of information collection, improve the level of food safety and monitoring management, coordinate all links in the food chain, increase the transparency of people's understanding of food, and ensure food safety. YANZEO has compiled the following applications of RFID technology in the food industry for your detailed understanding.
Food anti-counterfeiting applications
Due to the unsound legal system and the unregulated market, some lawbreakers specialize in counterfeiting famous and high-quality products to make huge profits. Most of them are famous wine and health care products.
Compared with other anti-counterfeiting technologies such as digital anti-counterfeiting, laser anti-counterfeiting, and other technologies, the advantages of using RFID radio frequency identification technology for anti-counterfeiting are: each label has a globally unique ID number, which cannot be modified and imitated; no mechanical wear, anti-magnetic, anti-fouling and waterproof; RFID readers have physical interfaces that are not directly open to end-users to ensure their own security; there is a mutual authentication process between readers and tags, and RFID can withstand high temperatures and have a long service life, the storage capacity is also relatively large; the label is easy to integrate into various commodities, which can greatly improve the difficulty and cost of counterfeiting.
In California, United States, Sea Smoke Cellars winery sticks RFID tags on the wine barrels and then tracks the wine information to prevent smuggling and so on.
The RFID Research Center of the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed an RFID anti-counterfeiting system for alcohol, which consists of specially designed bottle caps and bottle bodies, communication networks, RFID readers, and anti-counterfeiting database servers.
Food tracking and traceability
The concept of traceability as defined by the EU General Food Law is the ability to trace and trace food, feed, food animals, or substances intended to be added to food or feed at all stages of production, processing, and sale.
The food safety traceability system is to uses modern information identification technology to effectively identify each node in the whole process of the food supply chain. Tracking and traceability, information flow, and physical logistics are systematically combined.
Once health hazards are found, according to the information that must be recorded in each link of the production and sales process, the flow direction is tracked, and food safety emergency response measures such as food recall or delisting are taken.
The tracking and traceability of food is the main application of RFID technology in the food industry. The application of RFID systems ensures high-quality data exchange in the food supply chain, thorough implementation of "source-of-origin" food traceability schemes, and the ability to provide full transparency in the food supply chain.
The RFID system can provide the link between the food and the source in the food chain, and ensure the clarity of the food source, so as to track the specific animals or plants and farms, so as to realize the quality monitoring and traceability "from farmland to table".
The US government stipulates that food cattle must be equipped with electronic tags. Using RFID technology to track livestock and poultry, obtain the link between meat and animal sources in the food supply chain, trace the source of meat, and achieve the purpose of providing people with assured food.
In 2006, the Beijing Food Safety Supervision and Coordination Office of China proposed to use RFID technology in the slaughtering, production, and circulation links by wearing ear tags and foot tags on animal products in key breeding bases to realize animal product breeding, acquisition, slaughter, segmentation, The information of transportation and sales is recorded, and a traceable file is formed for tracking.
A pork monitoring system based on RFID technology has been established in Shanghai, China. Electronic radio frequency ear tags are placed on pig ears to record information such as feed, medical records, medicine feeding, group transfer, and quarantine of live pigs.
RFID cards are used for "point-to-point" supervision at major city border crossings and slaughterhouses to ensure that live pigs enter designated slaughterhouses. In the wholesale market, electronic tags are used to record the origin, transaction time, and safety testing results of edible agricultural products of pork traded in the market.
Food quality monitoring
In food processing and storage, factors such as temperature, humidity, and time have a great impact on food quality, so it is very important to record and analyze these factors. Combining RFID technology with sensor technology can sense the status information such as temperature, humidity, and light of surrounding objects and environment, and can use wireless communication technology to easily transmit this status information and its changes.
SYSCO Corporation, North America's largest foodservice marketing, and distribution organization has completed radio frequency and sensing system testing of a cryogenic storage and transportation system, demonstrating the ability of RFID technology to monitor temperature and environmental conditions during food transportation.
Japan's NTT company has carried out the experiment of using RFID technology to keep the wine quality fresh and grasps the quality change of rice wine by monitoring the temperature change during transportation.
Food logistics management
In order to ensure that food will not be miss-delivered or lost during transportation and circulation, or to reduce logistics costs and improve transportation efficiency, it is necessary to monitor and manage the entire logistics process.
The application of RFID technology to the food logistics management system can give full play to its characteristics of long-distance identification and multi-label simultaneous processing, greatly improve the sorting ability, processing speed, and accuracy of food, and reduce the problems caused by misdelivery or huge losses.
In addition, the application of RFID technology can also greatly improve work efficiency when tracking important materials or dangerous goods or finding a certain item among many items. Transportation companies and sales companies can also grasp the latest location of goods through wireless radio frequency identification technology and can prevent problems such as theft and package transfer.
Canadian Atlas Refrigerated Storage Group widely uses RFID system in its food logistics cold chain in a low-temperature environment, which not only reduces the labor intensity of workers, but also greatly improves efficiency, and promotes the integration of food cold storage and cold chain management.
The Australian company Moraitis has replaced barcodes with an RFID system to manage the shipping and sales of its hydroponic tomatoes. The system can provide the company with precise data, including when, where, and date of packaging as well as quality, category, and size.
In addition, RFID technology can be used for the control of processing objects and processing stations to ensure precise control of product formulations and improve product quality; RFID technology can also quickly find out the reasons for unqualified products and improve product quality in a timely manner; RFID technology can also be used In the breeding industry, it can be used to identify animals, record and control plagues, etc. There are mainly collar electronic tags, button-type electronic ear tags, ear-injection electronic tags, and rumen electronic tags placed through the esophagus to record the information about animals.
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