http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227126.500-barcodes-could-reveal-your-foods-credentials.html
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"Most manufacturers already use barcodes or RFID chips to track their products. But with the help of cheap cellphone and internet access it is becoming possible to collate data from remote locations around the world and make it available to the people who are actually going to eat the food.
"In many cases manufacturers are alive to the notion that transparency about the source of their food is good for business. Sime Darby, a large palm oil supplier in Indonesia and Malaysia, is working with FoodReg, a firm based in Barcelona, Spain, that develops food-tracking software. The idea is to develop a system to prove to customers that its crops are not grown on land recently occupied by tropical rainforest.
"In remote regions where farmers don't have access to computers, they can use cellphones to record onto FoodReg's online database the time and place the crop was harvested. Tracking systems like this should also make it easy to calculate the distance that goods travel to reach stores, allowing consumers to estimate the greenhouse gas emissions racked up by the transport of their food. "The calculation of food miles and carbon footprint could be the killer application for traceability," says Heiner Lehr of FoodReg. "The technology is there. If a big retailer puts itself behind this, it could happen very fast."
"Calculation of food miles and carbon footprint could be the killer application for traceability
TraceTracker, a Norwegian company formed in 2000 in response to a series of food safety scandals in Europe, also makes online databases that allow food to be tracked. It is collaborating with telecommunications company Intel to track halal food. They hope to develop a cheap mobile phone that farmers, suppliers and processing houses could use to load information about the production of food onto TraceTracker's database. Consumers could then use their own smartphones to check that the food they are buying comes from a licensed halal source. "It's much harder to cheat if you have electronic traceability," says Knut Jörstad, TraceTracker's chairman....
