Talk about an image problem. For weeks, newspapers around the world have carried stories about dairy-poisoned babies — at least six have died, and 300,000 have been sickened — and chronicled how milk, eggs, soy-based foods, and even candy bars containing ingredients from China have been contaminated with melamine, an industrial chemical used in plastics and fertilizers.
It’s no surprise, then, that the China Daily reported on Dec. 1 that the country’s milk exports had plunged by 92 percent since September, when news about the tainted milk emerged. But the damage doesn’t stop there. “It has harmed China’s entire food industry,” says Ole-Henning Fredriksen, chief executive of Norway’s TraceTracker Innovation, which is creating a global information exchange for the food industry. Based in Oslo, TraceTracker is one of 34 companies named on Dec. 4 by the World Economic Forum as tech pioneers — companies offering new technologies or business models that could advance the global economy and enhance peoples’ lives.
TraceTracker has developed an online service to identify and track each batch of every product that is merged together in the global food chain, from raw ingredients to products on the supermarket shelf. Its system is aimed at making food safer — and preventing entire industries from being tarnished by the misdeeds of a few.
ChinaTrace
To that end, on Sept. 24 TraceTracker signed an agreement with China’s Shandong Institute of Standardization, a government agency, to develop a system called ChinaTrace, to help companies in China’s food industry deal with internal traceability, set up third-party verification systems, and connect to a national grid. Foreign trading partners will, in turn, be able to use the database to gain assurances about the origins, freshness, and safety of every ingredient coming from China.
Systems like ChinaTrace aim to protect consumers and help save companies and industries from huge…