Tracing contamination of fresh food back from affected consumers to distributors and suppliers looks set to become a lot more straightforward thanks to work published in the Int. J. Critical Infrastructures.
A new study by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, reveals how information about fresh produce supply chains can be used to find probable sources when contaminants are found in food using a process called stochastic mapping. The technique has been applied to test data from the edible sprout sector. Such sprouts were the focus of a recent food scare in Europe in which tracing contaminated products that caused sickness in consumers was difficult with whole nations in the spotlight until the actual source of biological contamination was traced. The team’s approach could help preclude the repeat of such a debacle.
Sandia’s Stephen Conrad, Walter Beyeler and Theresa Brown point out that difficulties in adequately characterizing the connections between producers, distributors and suppliers, the food supply chain topologies, contribute to significant uncertainty in risk assessment in the food sector. This is often a serious problem when there is an outbreak of food poisoning in a particular region and the healthcare authorities cannot quickly trace the source of the outbreak, for instance.
The researchers explain that five main factors make the task so problematic.
- Supply chain topology can vary markedly from one food marketing system and agricultural sector to another.
- Even within a single agricultural sector, some portions of the supply chain may be vertically-integrated and characterized by enduring supplier/customer relationships while adjacent portions may be market-based and highly transitory.
- Customer/supplier relationships are sometimes considered to be proprietary information and can be closely held.
- Even among industry insiders, knowledge about supply chain topology can be relatively myopic. Many entities within the industry only know ‘one up and one down’ – that is, they only know their direct supplier (one up) and their direct customer (one down).
- Spot-market relationships can be ephemeral, with suppliers changing from one day to the next.
“Stochastic network representation provides the ability to incorporate and express the uncertainties using probability maps,” the team explains. “It provides capability that is needed for risk analysis and to design robust food defense strategies.”
Conrad, S.H., Beyeler, W.E. and Brown, T.J. (2012) `The value of utilising stochastic mapping of food distribution networks for understanding risks and tracing contaminant pathwaysยด, Int. J. Critical Infrastructures, Vol. 8, Nos. 2/3, pp.216-224.