A SOLUTION IN TRACKING AND TRACEABILITY OF TIANJIN's PORK PRODUCTION CHAIN FROM FARM TO TABLE

摘要

This paper presents considerations about the subject of traceability in the pork supply chain in China. It not only brings information technology issues, but also covers legal and marketing aspects,since the development of a traceability software system is supposed to fulfill food safety demands,national legislation and customer wishes. A complete low-cost solution of both tracking from farm to consumption and tracing the other way round is under study. Special and common bar code coding techniques were mainly adopted and a kind of carcass label made of polypropylene paper was designed. The data-record-keepings for an intensivism hoggery and for a live pig slaughter were developed based on intranet respectively, and they were finally integrated in a public traceability network information platform to supply access services for consumer and competent authority through internet. At the aspect of labeling data gathering just in time, an embedded PDA system was developed to deal with them and upload these data to local or remote servers through GPRS/ CDMA. These results show that traceability practices for pork is feasible in the context of information technology. Furthermore, with the decrease of the cost of the RFID system and increase of the stabilization of its running situation, RFID has a vast foreground application in food safety traceability because of its real automation identification and more storage capacity.