Benzinga | Mar 11, 2021 08:39AM EST

Park City Group's ReposiTrak Announces Food Traceability Leadership Consortium

Owner of the world's leading food safety compliance management platform establishes industry working group to provide a large-scale, economic traceability solution

ReposiTrak, Inc., the industry leader in supply chain compliance and quality management technology solutions with a user network of over100,000 facilities, is forming the Food Traceability Leadership Consortium (FTLC) to help food retail industry leaders collaborate on the development of open, low cost, easy to use food tracing technology. The consortium is an invitation-only group of food retailers, wholesalers and select suppliers.

FTLC members will work to address the urgent need for an affordable and practical solution to meet the proposed FDA Food Traceability requirements of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) scheduled to impact the food industry within two years. The goal of the consortium is to create and execute a collaborative plan to deploy food shipment track and trace technology and prepare the industry for any potential changes to FSMA. Combining ReposiTrak's highly scalable supply chain data sharing platform with the knowledge of seasoned retailers, wholesalers and suppliers will enable the consortium to gain experience with and shape the most practical and cost-effective technology forfood traceability success.

"The ReposiTrak platform helps thousands of companies in the food supply chain meet current food safety regulatory requirements, so we are fully aware that many companies believe the proposed food traceability regulations will impose onerous financial and operational burdens on the industry," says Randy Fields, chairman and CEO of ReposiTrak. "There is an affordable technology-enabled solution for the batch/lot level data tracking necessary to support food traceability, based on the ReposiTrak platform, which automatically handles similar data flows between trading partners on the scale of tens of millions of order/store/SKU data transactions daily."

The proposed FSMA regulations require capturing batch/lot and similar shipment level data for a wide variety of fresh produce, seafood and dairy products as they move through the supply chain. This is a massive data management challenge as it represents thousands of products, tens of thousands of locations and millions of critical tracking events in a near daily basis. Cumbersome label and scan approaches involving manpower and process changes will be economically and operationally unsustainable at this scale of activity. The ReposiTrak technology requires neither labeling nor scanning.

The consortium is being launched with the expectation that the expansion of food traceability requirements is inevitable, and that the risk of retailers not working together with suppliers and solution partners now could be disastrous later.

According to Fields, "If an 'every man for himself' approach to food traceability prevails, the industry could end up with a hodgepodge of non-interoperable systems. This will create a 'balkanized' supply chain where systems can't share critical traceability data between trading partners, resulting in massive operational complexity. Food retailers can't afford to let that happen, which is why we are engaging the industry now on a solution that involves no new labelling, no operational process change and is affordable down to the smallest supplier."

ReposiTrak welcomes inquiries from retailers, wholesalers and suppliers interested in joining this initiative for improved food safety through better recall execution and expanded food tracing capabilities. For more information, contact Derek Hannum, SVP of Customer Success for ReposiTrak at 435-645-2230 or dhannum@repositrak.com.