News broke yesterday that Amazon will purchase PillPack, a delivery pharmacy that sorts medication by dose. Amazon’s entry into pharmacy with PillPack and food service with Whole Foods is a great thing for IoT companies. Amazon has used technology to reinvent online shopping and is doing the same thing in pharmacies and supermarkets. Incumbent competitors will need to aggressively adopt IoT sensor technologies, such...
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The number of foodborne illness cases in recent years has been on the rise, frequently caused by preventable mistakes. In addition to having significant consequences to brand perception, these incidents have quantifiable impact on brand value.
As we covered in an earlier post, consumer groups who are upset about the unresolved outbreak of E. coli related to romaine lettuce have demanded that failures in the FDA traceability process be repaired before the end of the year. In this follow-up post, we’ll take a closer look at this process as required by the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) passed in 2011.
Food safety programs are broken. They are largely paper based, and lag behind technological innovations realized through wireless sensors and digital checklists. Every year, roughly 1 in 6 people (or 48 million people) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases. Many of these incidents are easily preventable, but companies who lack a modern food safety solution are not doing all they can...
The supply chain, a series of product transfers between manufacturers, distribution centers, and retail locations, is a complex network of transactions. From raw material to finished product, every transfer throughout the chain requires documentation to ensure that product quality is not compromised, items are en route to their correct destination, and a number of other parameters that require monitoring to...
In our recent post outlining the widespread outbreak of E.coli originating from romaine lettuce, we noted that the FDA has been unable to identify how or where the contamination occured in the supply chain. Since mid-March, more than 200 people across 35 states have become ill – and at least three have died. This outbreak is only one of the two outbreaks linked to leafy greens in the past six months whose source of...
