By Robert L. Wallack, American Journal of Transportation, San Francisco, CA Intelleflex, a Santa Clara, California based technology company, is testing a pallet-level radio-frequency identification (RFID) system to monitor temperatures in real-time from the produce fields in rural areas to the grocery stores in your neighborhood. This blockbuster new product introduction is bound to further food safety and quality of fresh and frozen produce as well as in pharmaceuticals across global supply chains. The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) signed into law and effective from early 2011 cites modernizing the supply chain with sharing data and technologies for Global Product Safety and Quality. Delivered Freshness is a registered trademark of Intelleflex Freshness Management Solutions and the system operates with three components. Battery Assisted Passive (BAP)-RFID readers including the company’s HMR-6100 Fixed, HMR-9090 and CMR-6100 cellular reader which features support from GSM carriers, the re-usable and battery assisted passive XC3 Technology RFID tags placed at the pallet level or in shipping containers, and the cloud based ZEST™ Data Services that can be accessed securely by any supply chain stakeholder. The benefit is to schedule in-transit routing changes before spoilage to food and pharmaceuticals by monitoring temperatures. In-transit monitoring interfaces enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, warehouse management systems (WMS), customer relationship management (CRM) or by mobile and web based applications. In summary, the temperature monitoring RFID tags are placed on the pallet of the temperature sensitive cargo and collects actionable data at any point in the movement of the cargo, then data is transferred via RFID readers to cellular networks, then to the distribution center applications for real-time decision making. “Growers ship to retail grocers and need to prove to grocers that produce is in good condition when received. They can use the cellular reader to collect data at the time of unloading or in-transit and the ZEST data services can aggregate, store, and disseminate the data,” stated Kevin Payne, Senior Director, Marketing, Intelleflex. He also said that there are “market pressures to take waste out of the supply chain.” The increasing risk of waste in the supply chain is proven by a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) report, “Pathway to Global Product Safety and Quality,” of July, 2011 citing FDA regulated products (food, drugs) account for 10% of all imports into the United States and arriving from 300,000 facilities in 150 countries. The U.S. Government Accountability (GAO) found that 60 percent of fruit and vegetables and 80 percent of seafood is produced from outside the U.S.A. An increasing volume of these shipments are coming from emerging economies. “China and India are expected to see a more than 400 percent increase in their produce exports between now and 2020,” stated the report. The seasonality of the produce is no longer an issue “demand is now year round for the U.S. consumer of fresh seafoods, fruits and vegetables which needs inspections, quality control, and traceability across air, sea and land transport,” said Payne. In the past nine months, Intelleflex gave results of two pilot tests that proved the effectiveness of the technology, Delivered Freshness, dynamically routing products in real-time based on remaining shelf life. The first test placed the tags in pallets of blackberries in the field in Mexico to packing houses, then onward to distribution centers in Southern California, Texas and Pennsylvania and the second test tracked the temperature and quality of fresh produce from San Diego area farms to distribution centers in Hawaii, and separately tested produce shipments from Taiwan’s Keelung port to distribution centers in Hawaii. “The blackberry pilot led to improvements in the cold chain that directly reduced spoilage and delivery of poor quality products,” said Payne. The berries pilot test in Mexico was in two segmen