Thai meat packer traces pork from pen to supermarket
29 April, 2008
category: RFID
Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand Foods (CPF) has deployed a RFID tracking system throughout its pork processing plant, allowing it to track its product from a whole hog’s arrival at the slaughterhouse to packaged pork landing on the store shelf.
Newly arrived hogs are placed on hang rails carrying RFID tags. These tags record the hog’s origin, including the name of the farm and the lot number. At each step of processing, more information is added to a linked database, and ultimately each pack of processed food is pedigreed with the name of the source farm, the finished-product type, weight, date of production and expiration. The package carries only the product code and lot number, with the details about each pack kept in the database.
CPF has introduced similar RFID systems to its shrimp processing plants, and plans to do the same with its chicken processing plants.