The US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has announced the 12 winners of its challenge to bring IoT and related technologies into the food supply chain.

The challenge, part of the FDA’s New Era of Smarter Food Safety initiative, aimed to bring low- or no-cost technology-enabled traceability into the food supply chain. There were 90 submissions, with the winning teams representing the USA, Canada and New Zealand. Submitting teams also hailed from Australia, China, England, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland and Taiwan.

A goal of the initiative is to achieve end-to-end traceability from source to table throughout the food safety system. The FDA wants to explore ways to encourage firms to adopt tracing technologies voluntarily and harmonise tracing activities, working towards outcomes that are achievable for all sectors of the system producing human and animal foods.

One of the goals in the New Era of Smarter Food Safety blueprint is to encourage the development of creative financial models that are low- to no-cost, proportional to benefits derived from participating, and enable human and animal food operations of all sizes to participate in a scalable, cost-effective way.

Launched in June, the primary goal of this challenge was to encourage stakeholders, including technology providers, public health advocates, entrepreneurs and innovators from all disciplines, to develop traceability hardware, software or data analytics platforms that are low-cost or no-cost to the end user.

The winning teams are:

• Atma.io provides item-level traceability to each participant in the food supply chain, from source to store and from farm to fork, using Avery Dennison systems and proprietary blockchain technology using Mastercard Provenance.
• FarmTabs is free, downloadable software run on Microsoft Excel that helps small and mid-size farmers manage records for traceability and other farm-related metrics.
• Freshly is traceability and batch-tracking software designed for small businesses, including retailers, manufacturers and distributors.
• HeavyConnect provides cloud-based digital traceability and compliance documentation, including an intuitive mobile app that allows producers to capture traceability data in the field and seamlessly share them across the supply chain.
• Kezzler uses self-service portals to generate item-level identifiers and associate homogenised datasets at the grower level through simple mobile applications.
• Mojix uses industry standards to link traceability events for each individual item and/or lot throughout the food supply chain to enable a low-cost and collaborative open data network.
• OpsSmart provides industry-proven, cloud-based traceability software to meet food safety, recall management and traceability needs of a complex supply chain.
• Precise’s Traceability Suite delivers efficient end-to-end supply chain tracking to all segments of the food market by using geospatial, machine learning and IoT technologies.
• Roambee, GSM and Wiliot’s offering uses low-cost IoT sensor tags in combination with shipment visibility and verification technologies to provide end-to-end traceability from farm to plate.
• Rfider is software-as-a-service that simplifies capturing, securing and sharing critical event data along supply chains all the way to consumers.
• TagOne uses a role-based data capture framework that updates an open-source blockchain platform, leverages industry standards to ensure interoperability, and ensures ease of use and data security.
• Wholechain is a supply chain traceability system that uses blockchain technology, in collaboration with Mastercard, to trace products back to their original source.