An Empirical Case Study for the Application of Agricultural Product Traceability System

Abstract

Globalization of the food supply chain has exacerbated the concerns for food-related safety issues and driven the demand for more information about the vertical and horizontal food supply chain. Transparency in the way agriculture was grown and handled throughout the supply chain process resulted in an important issue of ‘traceability’ in global food trade and safety. Traceability is an essential subsystem of quality management and must be managed by setting up a traceability system, which keeps the data tracking of product routes and of selected attributes. A collaborative research project for the supply and logistics of Tianjin Shawo radish was proposed recently. An end-to-end mobile application that traces the farming activities by using mobile handheld devices to capture information of farming operations is developed and implemented. Requirements analysis and system development for the traceability information of the food supply chain is studied. Applications of this mobile contract farming information management system show that the complicated manual traceability data recording can be significantly reduced for the farmers. The consumers’ confidence for healthy food choices with clear food traceability can be improved.