TRUETRAC Blog

Sr. Business Analyst Becky Bazabal

The way Becky Bazabal describes it, her job entails working with users to design software — which pretty much means she writes blueprints for developers. Becky is currently redesigning our CropTrac^TM application, which is an integral part of the suite of solutions offered by TRUETRAC. That being said, let’s just go ahead and analyze this analyst a little farther.

Meet Becky:

TRUETRAC: What did you do prior to coming to work for TRUETRAC?

Becky: I have over 11 years of experience designing and developing software for the agricultural industry, doing everything from the analysis, design and development to testing and user training. I have spent countless hours riding around in pickups with farmers and harvest managers while they explain the intricacies of agriculture and what makes it tick. And I’ve designed and developed a couple of other applications similar to CropTrac. Needless to say, I’ve been around the block — or the field — a time or two.

TRUETRAC: What attracted you to come to work for TRUETRAC?

Becky: The opportunity to do what I love, which is working with farmers and the agricultural community. The joke around the company is that they used my resume to write the job description. I wasn’t exactly looking for a new job but when I saw the job posting I couldn’t pass it up. It’s been a blessing working with such a talented and hardworking group here at TRUETRAC.

TRUETRAC: Where did you go to college, what did you major in, and how did that prepare you for the job you have today?

Becky: I’m an Aggie. I graduated from UC Davis with a degree in Read the rest of this entry…

Late last month, The California Farm Bureau Federation’s (CFBF) weekly newspaper, AgAlert, came out with an informed editorial about how we as an industry should be reacting to public demands for a change in our agricultural practices and in particular, the management of resources.

In recent years, consumers have displayed a growing awareness — and concern — about how food reaches the table from the fields. Everyone it seems is weighing in on the issue of preserving this huge globe we all live on, and everyone it seems has a differing opinion on how that is to be accomplished. Hosts of television cooking shows, book writers and filmmakers, as well as members of the health-care industry are challenging the way we run our industry, according to the AgAlert editorial.

Written by Tom Nassif, CEO of Western Growers, and Paul Wenger, president of the CFBF, the article asks how our industry can respond to concerns about ineffective production techniques, the waste of natural resources, the use of pesticides and fertilizers, air and water quality issues and the social challenges of establishing sustainability. In addition, the writers ask, how do we as an industry join the conversation without sounding defensive or combative?

The editorial’s asserts there’s no doubt we need to Read the rest of this entry…

It’s been a full year since President Obama signed into law the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) in ceremonies that touted the legislation as the most sweeping reform of food safety laws since 1938. Put simply, the new law is intended to ensure the safety of food in the United States by shifting the focus from merely responding to food-borne outbreaks to actually preventing them in the first place.

To be sure, progress has been made over the past 12 and a half months, with strong support for a seamless food safety program coming from those in the food industry, a consumer populace that is proactively pursuing the goals of the FSMA, and a variety of government partners.

The new bill gives the Food and Drug Administration more power to act when E. coli and salmonella outbreaks occur, including the ability to institute recalls, strengthen inspections, and demand that everyone along the food supply chain maintain tougher standards for keeping food safe.

So how is this food safety legislation stacking up a year after its enactment? Food Safety News, a daily Web-based newspaper dedicated to reporting on issues surrounding food safety, recently interviewed an FDA commissioner to gain insight on progress being made, as well as problems the agency still faces in imposing the new law.

Michael R. Taylor, J.D. is the deputy commissioner for foods at the FDA. What we want to do here is highlight some of the notions, predictions and thoughts he put forth in a recent Food Safety News conversation, beginning with progress in enacting the new legislation. Here are some of the issues culled from that interview: Read the rest of this entry…

In the long march toward implementation of the Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI), several documents have been updated by the initiative’s sponsor organizations (United Fresh, CPMA, GS1, and PMA), which taken as a whole, supplement previous milestones and highlight some important details coming our way.

Since there is no “one size fits all” in the fresh produce industry, the PTI’s leadership has assembled committees of knowledgeable industry veterans across retail, distribution, packing and technology, all of whom are working hard to recommend sound solutions and tackle known challenges so the rest of us don’t have to. These committees, and the people behind them, are working to navigate our industry, with its labyrinth of complexity, toward the greater good of PTI compliance. From time-to-time, documents are created and updated as questions are asked and solutions come to light.

Click on any of the items below for some of the more recent available updates:

• Best Practices for Product Substitutions (updated: February 3, 2012)
• Best Practices for Preparing to Assign GTINs (updated: February 3, 2012)
• Best Practices for Formatting Case Labels (updated: February 3, 2012)
• Data Synchronization: Growing Method Codes (updated: February 1, 2012)
• Data Synchronization: Grade Codes (updated: February 1, 2012)
• Data Synchronization: Commodity and Variant Codes (updated: February 1, 2012)

While we won’t go into the details of all the updates here, it’s important to point out that these documents may very well contain specifics that pertain to your operation and may alter the way you may implement PTI. Read the rest of this entry…

When shopping for a vendor to provide your company with a traceability system that meets the standards of the Produce Traceability Initiative and does so in a hands-on, responsible and reliable manner, it’s important that you do the homework ahead of time.

Blindly grabbing at the first vendor who turns up at your corporate doorstep offering you a solution is not the way to handle this all-important tasking decision. This is a time when comparison-shopping is worth the extra time and effort to ensure you are getting the technology solution provider you need.

Here, we pose 10 points that fresh produce growers should be asking vendors when shopping for a PTI-related provider:

1. Does the vendor have a good understanding of the PTI initiative? The ability to understand, discern and discuss the objectives of the PTI can indicate that this vendor is committed and compliant to the overall objectives of the initiative.

2. Does the vendor offer a solution that complies with the PTI initiative? Be careful, because some traceability vendors do not offer systems that comply with the PTI! This only serves to confuse the true mission of the PTI for many growers. Solutions must comply with the standards set forth by PTI, which include GS1 compliance with case level traceability.

Warning: Don’t make a decision based on price alone. Industry experts understand the need for an industrywide, standards-based, non-propriety supply chain solution. Understanding your own needs and weighing those against the solutions available will help you determine the right solution for your particular needs.

3. How long has the vendor been providing traceability systems? Some companies are offering solutions, but they don’t necessarily have strong industry experience.. Oftentimes, vendors will use new customers to Read the rest of this entry…

Editor’s Note: Like most everyone else who read the news, we at TRUETRAC are not too happy about a report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that points to an increase in outbreaks of food-borne illnesses in the U.S. this past year. The CDC reported there were 16 such outbreaks in 2011, with five of those involving fresh produce. Here is our take on this development.

By Ray Connelly, TRUETRAC President

According to the CDC, last year was the most active in recent history for food-borne illnesses that crossed state lines, and as a member of the fresh produce industry, we here at TRUETRAC don’t like to read reports like this. The CDC said there were 16 such outbreaks in 2011, with five of them involving fresh produce, including romaine lettuce, two outbreaks of cantaloupes, papayas, alfalfa and spicy sprouts. That’s up from figures released in 2010 that showed there were a dozen such outbreaks, with four of those involving fresh produce.

Do these statistics mean our practices are getting worse? Are incidents of food-borne illnesses more prevalent today? Or, is it that Pulse-Net’s — the national network of public health and food regulatory agency laboratories coordinated by the CDC — ability to detect food-borne illness in the early stages is greatly improving? It also helps that improvements to sampling techniques and testing technology have made early detection much easier than in the past.

Incidences of food poisoning are ripe fodder for predatory news organizations, with those of us in the industry becoming an accessible and easy target for blame. Not to mention the fact that today’s consumer is very savvy about food safety and demands immediate information about what is being sold at their market (user-generated content online, for instance, has made instant reporting a fact of life, providing increased public awareness of such incidents the moment they occur). Add all this up and we’ve got ourselves the perfect storm. Read the rest of this entry…

Ian Duffield, COO - TRUETRAC

Our favorite ex-pat stepped off a plane from across the pond more than two decades ago and put down permanent roots in this country. We here at TRUETRAC are fortunate that Ian Duffield decided those roots should be planted near our headquarters in Salinas, Calif. Our COO has a passion for produce traceability and food safety, and he has a hand in most everything we do here.

Meet Ian, our cheerful COO.

TRUETRAC: What is it exactly that you do here at TRUETRAC?

Ian Duffield: My official title is Chief Operating Officer, however as is often the case with small companies, everyone has to chip in wherever they are needed. In addition to being responsible for customer service and implementations, legal and internal business processes, I also add my expertise to investor relations, sales and product development — plus I make the coffee every morning!

TRUETRAC: What did you do prior to coming to work for TRUETRAC?

Ian: Most recently I was COO at a marketing software company in Fresno, California, and prior to that was Chief Information Officer at companies in the Silicon Valley. I grew up in England and spent the first part of my career in IT roles at manufacturing companies there, including Black & Decker and Rolls-Royce Motor Cars.

TRUETRAC: What attracted you to come to work for TRUETRAC?

Ian: Several things. I believe strongly in the ethical part of what we do. Bringing software tools to the industry to support traceability and food safety is very important in the world, and so there was an element of providing an important service in my decision. Also, I had worked with our CEO, Ray Connelly, at Read the rest of this entry…

It’s been a year since President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) and in that time, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says it has made giant strides in getting its ducks in a row to improve food safety in the U.S.

In a progress report released last week, the FDA issued a long list of accomplishments achieved to date in its effort to implement the complex food safety reform law. Included in that summary are issues related to domestic inspections of food facilities, including those in the produce industry.

In the past year, the FDA and its state counterparts said they conducted more than 20,000 inspections of food facilities. The goal is to meet the FSMA’s inspection frequency demands and develop risk-based approaches to national inspections that will provide the most protection to the public.

Among the tasks undertaken last year were a number of outreach and technical assistance projects performed by the FDA, including:

• Participating in more than 350 meetings with industry leaders, farmers, consumers, public officials, and academics.
• The agency has been working closely with USDA on produce safety, taking part in more than a dozen farm tours across the country to find ways that the rules can work successfully from among a number of commodities, growing conditions and practices.
• Three federal entities — the FDA, the Department of Agriculture and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture — are setting up a competitive grant program for food safety training and other projects.
• The FDA held three public meetings on preventive controls, import provisions, and changes to inspection and compliance programs in a preventive controls environment.
• The agency has been a participant in more than 70 international meetings to discuss the global impact of the food safety act.
• The FDA also assisted and helped fund the Produce Safety Alliance and the Food Safety Preventive Controls Alliance. These alliances were established to help small firms comply with the food safety act.
• An FSMA webpage was successfully set up and now has more than 10,000 email update subscribers. The site features a FAQ feature with more than 100 questions, as well as informative videos, webinars, presentations and print materials.

In addition to education and assistance, the FDA has implemented a number of other important steps, including: Read the rest of this entry…

According to Wikipedia, a New Year’s resolution is a commitment you make “to one or more lasting personal goals, projects, or the reforming of a habit.” This goal, project, or reforming of a habit must be reached by the next New Year, keeping in mind that this is a goal, not a wish, and should be something that you could achieve.

With that in mind, here’s a short list of what we believe every fresh produce industry leader should resolve to do before the end of 2012, the year we see the Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI) take effect:

1. Appoint someone in your organization to be responsible for PTI compliance. Hopefully, you’ve already found a qualified employee or team to take charge of PTI compliance for your fresh produce operation. This individual or team is tasked with researching the initiative and the technical requirements, reviewing internal software programs, and analyzing workflow processes and impacts to labor needs. It’s not a simple task. And, of course, PTI compliance places additional workload on top of current job responsibilities, but once you have someone in place to oversee and manage the process, you and everyone on your team will sleep better at night, which is another great resolution for 2012!

2. Set a goal of PTI compliance by a certain date. Does it matter if your business is PTI compliant in March 2012 versus Jan. 1? No one knows for sure, but what we’re hearing from folks in retail is that they plan to give preference to those fresh produce operations that are PTI compliant sooner rather than later, so now’s a great time to get started!

3. Learn exactly how you fit in to the produce supply chain as it relates to PTI. The initial phase of PTI compliance involves getting a label on a case in the most cost-effective, efficient and accurate means possible. Now consider where you fit in the supply chain and make an assessment of all the places where a traceability solution might impact your current operations.

4. Talk to top-tier solution providers who really know your business. Don’t operate in a vacuum or assume no one knows your business like you do. The fresh produce industry is supported by a number of Read the rest of this entry…

It’s a brand new year and we’re hitting the decks running with a listing of produce industry events already scheduled for 2012. Part of our reasoning for getting this list out to you now is to assist in your budgeting and travel scheduling.

Another reason for us presenting conference and trade show dates now is to remind all of our customers and industry followers of the importance of industry gatherings. Topping that list, of course, is the opportunity for face-to-face networking with peers. In addition, these events offer all of us timely updates on regulatory issues. And with the Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI) scheduled to go on line at the end of the year, keeping abreast of new developments is a must.

And don’t forget that many of these events offer educational sessions, all with the goal of updating what we know and enriching what we think we know. Playing catch up with new developments in the industry is much easier when it’s done in consistent small doses.

And naturally, we encourage trade professionals to budget for and attend these events because it offers those of us who support the fresh produce industry with innovative products and services the opportunity to hear about your pain points and ultimately improve our solutions.

Here then is a list of industry events that we here at TRUETRAC encourage you to attend in 2012. We certainly hope we’ll see you at a few of them: Read the rest of this entry…