CORK, Ireland -- An Irish company has developed a new process that uses DNA fingerprinting to keep track of cows.
While it seems like a scene from The Far Side, the technique has real-life application a million miles from Larson's weirdo whimsy: quality control.
The fingerprinting technique, which uses the trade name TraceBack, was developed in the wake of Europe's mad cow disease scare. BSE, or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, almost caused the collapse of the beef industry in England and the rest of Europe, when beef from those countries was banned in many parts of the world.
BSE sparked off a panic because it was linked to the human disease vCJD, or variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. Since then, quality assurance has become a top priority with retailers and producers.
TraceBack allows for the T-bone on your table to be tracked to the field where it was calved.
It works by taking a blood, meat or even a hair sample from the cow, either in the farmer's field or at the abattoir. That sample is stored. And when the meat cuts arrive on supermarket shelves, another sample is taken to track where the cow came from. Samples are matched to verify origins.
The idea stemmed from research into bovine genetics at the Institute of Genetics at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, which led to the spin-off company Identigen. "We had been looking at molecular genetics among cattle for several years when there was a major BSE scare (in 1996), and at the time most commentators were suggesting that traceability was a major issue. That's what inspired the idea," said Ciaran Meghan, a founder and the managing director of the company.
The system was tested with 95,000 cattle that were DNA-sampled for Superquinn, an Irish supermarket chain. "First and foremost, TraceBack gives us the information we need to stand over our promise to customers -- that the meat on Superquinn's shelves can be traced back not only to the farm, but to the individual animal it came from," said Senator Feargal Quinn CEO of Superquinn.
The traceability stakes are high. "Trust is central in meat purchases, because you cannot judge what's important by looking at the product, so you have to believe in the product you're getting. The only time you discover that your trust is broken is when a scare occurs," said Mary McCarthy, a lecturer in food economics at University College Cork in Ireland. "Traceability reassures the consumer and protects the supplier or retailer."
The concept was proved at Superquinn. "Our beef sales have increased steadily over the past number of years, and in 2000 were 11 percent ahead of 1999," Quinn said. The figures are impressive, given that recent EU official statistics showed that toward the end of April 2001 total beef consumption was estimated to be about 18 percent lower than corresponding 2000 levels.
TraceBack has more applications than guaranteeing the origin of meat products. In Ireland, farmers will be obliged to send a hair sample of every new-born calf from next year. The sample can then be used to prevent cattle smuggling, which thrived in the wake of Ireland's foot-and-mouth epidemic earlier this year.
The collected meat and blood samples could also be used to track the health of the animal. "You could test for prohibited substances, you could potentially test for pathogens, potentially for meat quality attributes, but on a case-to-case basis you'd have to look at the cost of the test and the value-add it procures," Meghan said.
While the most urgent application for Identigen's TraceBack system is in the beef sector, other species could also be traced through the system. "We could use the same system to trace pigs, for example," Meghan said.
Back-of-an-envelope calculations indicate that, if entire national herds were tracked, the market could be worth $100 million in Europe and $400 million in the United States for the beef market alone. While that is not likely in the near term, verifiable traceability is a continuing trend in all types of food processing.
"An example I heard of was with vanilla, where a company was looking at prospective suppliers' country of origin regulations, the processors' extraction process and water quality," said C.J. Reynolds, director of marketing and business development at Silliker, of Chicago, Illinois, which will market TraceBack in the United States.
"Quality assurance is really evaluating sources of individual ingredients."
