Over the years, this column has explored some novel solutions to tracking and tracing products in the supply chain—solutions that can help spot food fraud or simply let a producer/processor know where its product is, where it’s been and how long it spent traveling from point A to B. The problem is that most solutions have used the packaging as the vehicle to support bar codes or other data necessary for tracing a product’s journey. What happens if the product gets separated from its packaging?
Now a new technology answers that question and promises not only to track high-value products subject to fraud but also dry, bulk commodities like grain. How so? Imagine a bar code so small that it’s the size of DNA strands. In fact, the “bar code” is constructed of DNA strands from seaweed, is FDA-affirmed GRAS, and can be safely applied to fruits, grains, produce and other foods. With this technology, billions of bar code permutations can be created, and food treated with these DNA strands can be inspected with a simple machine capable of being operated by anyone to “read” the bar code.