When it comes to thorny issue of food safety, a technology initiative called Trellis is emerging to help companies exchange safety information.
Based on blockchain’s distributed ledger system, it is being adopted by a range of industries ranging from financial services to perishables.
Wilson Produce is part of the pilot initiative, and general manager Guillermo Martinez, said, “Trellis is basically a framework to exchange food safety information (e.g., audits) between companies in a database form so the information is truly electronic and can be data-mined and analyzed more efficiently. This technology is ‘mounted’ on blockchain for security handshakes.”
It seems there is also more of a move towards protected agriculture, including more greenhouses and shadehouses.
Matt Mandel, vice president of operations at SunFed, calls it “a wholesale adoption of protected growing where applicable. Some crops lend themselves to having much better yields while growing indoors versus being grown in open field conditions. So, if you can actually get better quality and better yield, it will typically justify the investment.”
Martinez too sees more of a move in this direction, considering it lends itself to higher efficiency and better control for food safety.
In addition, Alex Madrigal, president of Covilli Brand Organics, Inc., points to gains in protected tomato and pepper production year after year.
And the trend isn’t just in Mexico and Canada, but the United States as well, with new protected structures popping up across the country.
This is an excerpt from the most recent Produce Blueprints quarterly journal. Click here to read the full supplement.
