Update:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration believes it has traced the source of the latest E. coli outbreak. The agency said Monday the romaine linked to the outbreak appears to be from the California’s Central Coast region. It said romaine from elsewhere should soon be labelled with harvest dates and regions so people know it’s safe to eat.
… Romaine harvesting recently began shifting from California’s Central Coast to winter growing areas, primarily Arizona, Florida, Mexico and California’s Imperial Valley. Those winter regions weren’t yet shipping when the illnesses began. The FDA also noted hydroponically grown romaine and romaine grown in greenhouses aren’t implicated in the outbreak.
I was on a committee studying traceability of components in large computers, and we looked at the wine industry. From the barcode on the bottle and a bunch of databases you can trace the grapes that went into the wine to a few meters, as well as the cork and the vats where the wine was aged. They were well ahead of high-tech us. So the ability to trace where food comes from is nothing new, and the industry has no excuse for not adopting it.
I don’t disagree. However, it should be noted that the wine industry is a very different animal than cheap lettuce. All those databases exist to make money, not to make wine safe. If a winemaker comes across a particularly successful batch of wine, they can look at the database to find out where those grapes came from, which barrels were used, etc. All this is to make better wine (and make more money).
That said, it is a sad commentary that ‘industry’ is willing to invest in making tastier wine and not willing to invest in making safe food.
I’m suspicious of this, based on what I know about the wine industry (family business). There are million gallon tanks, there’s no way to trace what grapes went into what bottle at that size. At the smaller sized wineries that I’m more familiar with the origin of the grapes going into the crusher are monitored but I don’t believe any GPS information is captured. Also, blends are mixed with a variety of fruit and juice that would make the information quite complex.
I’ll ask my BIL what they capture and what if anything is available to outside eyes via the barcodes.
I’d say if the source of the infection can be found then other producers of romaine lettuce should be able to sue that farm/company for letting contaminated product to the public which caused the good farmers to lose money.
(And if not a farm but a distribution point then sue that distribution point…or food store or wherever it happend.)
No. If you are selling good products, and someone else is selling something that is dangerous, but indistinguishable from your products, you should be compensated. Even if a farmer had taken the precautions listed in this thread, their sales would still have been hurt because of such a wide reaching recall.
I doubt you need that level of precision just for tasty wine. It is not like you could reproduce the exact conditions in a sector of the vineyard.
My wife worked in a vegetable cannery, and they had serial numbers allowing them to track cans very accurately. Not needed when she was there, thankfully. This was long before PCs - I don’t think the place had a single computer in it. But the food industry does (mostly) care about food safety a lot. Not the romaine industry, it seems.
The source of this was an article about the industry. It was not GPS - not back then, anyway - but in my understanding it was tracking which parts of the vineyard went into which shipments.
I don’t know if two buck chuck does this - it might be just for higher quality wines.
I’ve been to Korbel, and smaller wineries, and didn’t see any million gallon tanks.
If your wine has a ton of different grapes in it, you are going to get a big list of places where they came from, sure. That should be enough to narrow down a problem. I’m not saying each bottle would be traced to one or two locations.
Don’t overestimate the difficulty of traceability. When one of computers failed in the field, I was able to trace when the processors in it were made, what happened to them, and what happened to the processors near them on the wafer. The food industry can be pretty good at this, when they want to.
Even high quality wines can be made in large volume, although nothing like the nearly half a million tons of grapes processed annually at Gallo’s largest plant in California. And that’s one of 7 large plants.
The smaller label my family runs produces wine only from the 17 acre vineyard they own, so it’s possible to know fairly closely where the grapes come from. There are at least five varietals grown there, so each one is fairly localized. They keep records about how much each vine produces, but the crush is done with fairly large loads and then blended in larger 15000 gallon tanks, so there’s no way to trace any wine back to any specific vine or area in the vineyard.
The larger label buys fruit from other vineyards, some local and some upstate. By the time it arrives at the winery there’s no way to trace a particular tanker truck’s content’s more than in a general sense. It’s possible to keep accurate records that you can trace to the bottling line if you only ever operate on a very small scale, but very few wineries do that.
Again, let me call my BIL tonight and I’ll see what he has to add.
Here is what looks like a traceability standard (in pdf) which is the kind of thing I was talking about. It seems to be EU -centric, but people from the US were involved. It specifically mentions traceability to the grape plot.
That dosn’t mean this standard is implemented in the US, but it seems to exist.
No, that’s part of the risk of being in that industry. The food industry is fraught with contamination risk. As someone that decides to go into business in that industry, that’s part of the risk of being in that industry.
Using your argument, if you operate in a very dangerous industry where your employees could die if they aren’t careful, and OSHA says you have to implement these very costly programs to protect your employees, but you say, my company has never had an accident, my employees know what to do, I shouldn’t have to implement these costly training and safety programs simply because other companies just aren’t safe. That doesn’t fly.
I spoke with my sister last night, and the only information in the bar code on their wine is the varietal and vintage, same information as is on the label. In a small batch that would be fairly easy to trace since everything comes from a single tank. For any release that comes from multiple tanks and/or blends (and that’s most of them) there’s no way to trace to the bottle.
While I understand the standard linked above, as soon as you use large tanks and/or blend multiple tanks together the information would become meaningless. There is literally no way to know where the grapes that went into any specific bottle came from.
I work in the chemical industry. The capability to track what is added in to even the largest of tanks, and to model and calculate the composition of anything loaded out of that tank is well-established. The pharma industry is even more sophisticated about it. This is really, really basic stuff; we did those sort of CSTR calculations manually when I was getting my ChemE degree in the '80s. Nowadays, there’s package software that does the modeling and is tied in with the charges (weigh scales, charge meters, etc.) so it’s all automated. If needed, I can tell the proportion of a couple partial drums in each of a couple railcars produced from the same batch.
The fact that the small wine business which you are familiar with does not do this does not mean that other wine producers do not do so, and is certainly no indication of what is possible. It’s just an indication that they haven’t made the investment to do so. Which is analogous to the romaine lettuce producers not having done so.
I don’t think that is the intent of the standard. You will know the set of grapes which went into the vat from which the wine was produced. That would narrow the search for a bad vine down a lot, especially if another winery also produced bottles with issues. Then you can do the intersection of the vineyards producing the grapes for both bottles.
In any case if the wine is blended I think it would be fair to say that the wine came from all the grapes going into the vat. That would be a lot to track by hand, but not by computer.
The real benefit of this - and I’ve done it for computers - is that if you have a set of bad product, you can find the commonalities among them. If the corks came from a lot of different lots you can rule it out. If all bad bottles had corks from a single lot, that would be suspicious.
Thanks to Lightray for the chemical example. For computers, though you can get the serial id for a single microprocessor, for something like a resistor you would only get the lot - which might be thousands of components. Still better than nothing.
You are not going to be able to look at the barcode for one bottle and figure out the cause of the problem - but the information will be crucial. We pushed for traceability after spending months tracking down a problem which could have been found in days if we had it.