Barcodes Could Reveal Your Food’s Credentials

Most manufacturers already use barcodes or RFID chips to track their products. 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 consumers in grocery stores.

In many cases, are open to the notion that transparency about the source of their food is good for business. The idea is to develop a system to prove to customers that 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 the time and place the crop was harvested into an online database. 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. Heiner Lehr of FoodReg says, “The technology is there. If a big retailer puts itself behind this, it could happen very fast.”

Original article: Barcodes could reveal your food’s credentials