Recent national outbreaks of E.coli and salmonella poisoning are likely to prompt government mandates requiring that food products be tracked throughout their lifecycles--and that could prove to be a boon for radio frequency identification technologies.
The new mandates would come just as other first-generation track-and-trace tools start to spread through the pharmaceutical industry, which was the first to face such government mandates, analysts say.
So far, barcode systems and pen-and-paper processes are the most popular drug-tracking tools, but observers expect RFID to emerge as the long-term technology of choice in both the pharmaceutical and food industries.
Source: Computerworld