New and evolving FDA regulations are ramping up tracking and tracing requirements for food and beverage manufacturers to hasten the identification and rapid removal of potentially contaminated food from the market and reduce the number of foodborne illnesses and deaths. As such, many food and beverage manufacturers are actively seeking solutions to improve their tracking and tracing capabilities. Janine Clunn, Category Marketing Team Manager at RS, addresses these new regulations and provides insights into some essential tracking and tracing solutions that can help customers improve food and beverage product safety, bolster consumer confidence, and get compliant.
Janine Clunn, Category Marketing Team Manager, RS
The food and beverage manufacturing industry is one of the largest manufacturing sectors in the U.S. economy. It generates over $700 billion in revenue, accounting for over 4% of the national GDP. It is also one of the largest sectors of the greater food and beverage industry, which includes the agriculture, food service, food distribution, and food marketing sectors as well and generates almost 20% of the national GDP — over $1.5 trillion.
While the food and beverage manufacturing industry has always been subject to a slate of stringent regulations, and understandably so, recent updates to the FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) significantly ramp up tracking and tracing requirements. FSMA section 204, “Enhancing Tracking and Tracing of Food and Recordkeeping,” prompted the FDA to explore and evaluate methods and appropriate technologies for rapid and effective food tracking and tracing, publish a food traceability list, and publish the new “Requirements for Additional Traceability Records for Certain Foods.” The new FSMA 204 requirements, which published in November 2022, establish a standardized approach to additional traceability recordkeeping for people who manufacture, process, pack, or hold foods included on the food traceability list (FTL) and cover domestic and foreign firms that produce food for U.S. consumption, spanning the entire farm-to-table food supply chain.
The new FSMA 204 requirements are also a key component of the FDA’s new Blueprint for the New Era of Smarter Food Safety, which describes the organization’s plan to leverage smart technologies to further enhance traceability, improve predictive analytics, reduce food contamination, improve response times to outbreaks, address new business models, modernize retail operations, and foster the development of stronger food safety cultures. The new FDA blueprint frames the new FSMA 204 requirements, which are limited to food on the FTL, as a foundational first step on the path to promoting tech-enabled end-to-end traceability for all foods.
The compliance date for the new FSMA 204 regulations is January 20, 2026. By that point, the people identified in the FDA’s “Requirements for Additional Traceability Records for Certain Foods” must maintain records containing key data elements (KDEs) associated with specific Critical Tracking Events (CTEs) and provide that information to the FDA in as quickly as 24 hours. Additional requirements inspired by the new FDA Blueprint for the New Era of Smarter Food Safety will follow.
The goal of these increasingly rigorous traceability requirements is to hasten the identification and rapid removal of potentially contaminated food from the market and reduce the number of foodborne illnesses and deaths, neither of which are as uncommon as you might think. In fact, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 48 million people get sick each year from foodborne diseases, around 128,000 of those are hospitalized, and roughly 3,000 die.
So, for the sake of safety, consumer confidence, and compliance, many food and beverage manufacturers are actively seeking solutions that will improve their tracking and tracing capabilities. In fact, a July 2023 report by Next Move Strategy Consulting revealed that food traceability technology is projected to have a CAGR of 7.8% through 2030 and reach a value of $29.43 billion by 2030, which is up about 129% from its 2019 value of $12.86 billion.
Effective traceability ensures that food and beverage products move through the supply chain in an accountable manner and remain safe and high quality. It also:
- Supports periodic audits and reporting.
- Helps identify, prevent, and troubleshoot quality issues and optimize processes.
- Mitigates costly recall risks.
- Enables quick and efficient recalls when necessary.
- Satisfies growing consumer demand for food and beverage product details that extend well beyond current labeling requirements, like geographic origins, supplier information, hallmarks of quality, taste profiles, and animal and plant health.
- Helps suppliers navigate supply chain issues including unpredictable supplies of raw ingredients and shipping delays.
As such, effective traceability is quickly becoming a way for suppliers to both differentiate themselves from and gain a competitive advantage over competing suppliers.
Effective traceability is only possible if the systems monitoring the various manufacturing steps are connected and integrated, and users must have access to enough tracking data. Process data can help identify food and beverage contents, recipe structures, expiration dates, and shelf lives. It can also help food and beverage manufacturers enact predictive maintenance strategies, manage corrective actions, and capitalize on optimization opportunities.
Due to expanded industry regulations and evolving customer demands related to food and beverage traceability, smart devices, apps, and software that allow users to automatically record and centrally collect and analyze equipment and process data are rapidly replacing the manual traceability spreadsheets of the past.
IIoT devices play a key role in the automated collection and analysis of traceability data and can record information ranging from the source of the ingredients to the quality of the product when it left the factory, the temperature of the truck it was transported in, and the quality of the product upon arrival at its final sales destination. IIoT devices essential to food and beverage traceability include temperature sensors and humidity sensors as well as adapters from suppliers like Banner Engineering that allow manufacturers to integrate legacy equipment into IIoT networks to support full traceability.
Cloud-enabled enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions play a key role in unifying data from IIoT devices and other factory equipment as well as processing and analyzing that data in real-time so manufacturers can act on it almost immediately.
These solutions tend to rely on EtherNet/IP and PROFINET devices capable of supporting IT/OT integration, like Red Lion’s managed Ethernet switches. And both these solutions and IIoT devices rely on robust networks of industrial data communications products including Ethernet switches, IoT edge gateways, protocol converters, routers, and wireless communications equipment.
Solutions including smart labels equipped with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology or QR codes, barcode scanners, and thermal printers also support full transparency, allowing manufacturers, regulatory bodies, and customers to track the journey of food and beverage products throughout the supply chain, from farm to table.
RFID technologies transmit data through radio waves that are relayed back to a computer and are often used to identify and track products and improve supply chains and processes. These systems consist of components like tags equipped with RFID chips and one or more readers. These readers translate the data on the RFID tags they scan and transmit information about the tagged items’ identity and location to a central database.
The Balluff BIS M Series Industrial RFID System, for instance, is rated for washdown environments, which makes it especially useful for traceability in the food and beverage industry, and offers high-temperature, metal-mount, hardened, and disposable tagging options to suit a variety of application demands. It supports close-range asset tracking and quality traceability applications, ranging from tracking food products through distribution and storage to ensuring that foods remain a safe temperature during transportation and storage and monitoring the shelf life of food. Supporting solutions for RFID technologies include double-ended cordsets and mounting hardware.
The 13.56MHz Balluff BIS M Series Industrial RFID System supports global ISO standards and exhibits high data transmission speeds that make it ideal for high-data-volume applications. It is available with a variety of data carriers and read/write heads for broad application suitability and is especially well suited for tracking and tracing applications. Balluff also offers industrial cable assemblies and mounting hardware necessary for installation.
Barcode readers, sometimes also referred to as 2D and 1D barcode scanners, identify the information embedded in standard barcodes and RFID- or QR-code-enabled smart labels and transmit that information to a computer. They are widely used in material handling and packaging processes. Enabling solutions include mounting hardware and industrial cable assemblies.
Datalogic Matrix 120 barcode readers are the smallest industrial 2D imagers on the market with embedded Ethernet connectivity and are designed to deliver high performance in challenging food and beverage environments. They’re available in a variety of different models for broad application suitability and are ideal for traceability applications in the food and beverage industry.
Thermal printers from trusted suppliers including Phoenix Contact, Brady, Epson, Panduit, and TE Connectivity are widely used to print labels essential for food and beverage traceability processes. These printers produce images by passing thermal paper (i.e., paper with a thermochromic coating) over a print head consisting of tiny electrically heated elements and, as such, don’t require any ink.
Sourcing Tracking and Tracing Solutions for Food and Beverage Manufacturing
The RS food and beverage industry product portfolio includes more than 78,000 in-stock and ready-to-ship solutions engineered to provide end-to-end solutions for a wide variety of food and beverage industry applications. The portfolio supports customers who manufacture food and beverage products as well as customers who build food and beverage manufacturing equipment, such as industrial mixers, commercial ovens, and packaging equipment, and commercial service equipment, including commercial toasters and frozen drink machines.
Due to new and evolving FDA regulations, customers who manufacture food and beverage products will soon be tasked with complying with even more rigorous tracking and tracing requirements. RS offers a variety of products designed to help food and beverage manufacturers improve safety, bolster consumer confidence, and comply with the new FDA tracking and tracing applications, including temperature sensors, humidity sensors, RFID technologies, barcode readers, thermal printers, Ethernet switches, and other industrial data communications products. RS also offers professional services designed to support these customers, including technical support, custom cable assemblies, and kitting, bagging, and labeling.
Other solutions available in the RS food and beverage industry product portfolio include material handling and packaging, preventative maintenance, and facilities maintenance products, sensors, industrial controls, enclosures, PLCs and HMIs, motors and motor controls, pneumatics and fluid controls, and wire and cable from a wide range of industry-leading suppliers.
For assistance identifying and deploying tracking and tracing products optimized for food and beverage industry applications that will bring you in compliance with the new FSMA 204 requirements and help you prepare for the evolving regulations described in the FDA’s new Blueprint for the New Era of Smarter Food Safety, please contact your local RS representative at 1.866.433.5722 or reach out to our technical product support team.
