A new business aims to provide affordable traceability solutions to small family growers through use of a produce brand utilizing GS1 item-specific DataBar labeling.
"The thing I'm trying to communicate to growers is that this produce company is an advocate for the small grower, said John Bailey, executive director of the firm Top 10 Produce LLC, Salinas, Calif.
Top 10 Produce LLC supports the Produce Traceability Initiative, he said, and encourages small growers to adopt GS1 item-specific traceability utilizing the DataBar on loose produce items.
As the brand owner, Top 10 Produce will provide the GS1 DataBar for $180 per year to all of its growers licensed prior to Jan. 1, 2010, Bailey said. Top 10 Produce has enough GS1 numbers to have 1,000 growers in the program, and more capacity can be added if needed, he said May 27.
Top 10 Produce has contracted with a label supplier, and growers who sign up with Top 10 will deal with that company to purchase whatever amount of labels they need for any particular season.
"The real benefit to you as a grower is that you don't know who is going to ask for that (DataBar), but you don't need to know," he said.
Depending on who they sell to, growers can determine whether or not to apply the item level DataBar to their produce.
Growers can apply GS1 labels to their cases as well as items, but he noted that growers who sell to repackers may not want to do that since the repacker will have his own GS1 company code the cases he ships.
"Everything is scalable in design to what the individual needs," he said.
Bailey said growers who use the Top 10 Brand GS1 item-level DataBar label (consisting of the barcode and the word mark Top 10 Produce) will still be allowed to use their own family name on their boxes and packaging.
"From a pride perspective, it is important to the small growers and farmers and what I see it is increasingly important to consumer that I'm not dealing with a large faceless corporation here," Bailey said.
Momentum toward traceability
Small growers will soon be compelled by their retail buyers to move toward the GS1 DataBar, he said.
"They will have a packinghouse full of produce and a retailer saying I won't buy it unless you have a GS1 barcode on it," he said. "I think everybody is going to be doing it by Jan. 1, 2011, and they don't even know it."
Major retailers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Bentonville, Ark., Winn-Dixie Stores, Jacksonville, Fla., and Loblaw Cos. Ltd., Brampton, Ontario, already use the DataBar, but many others won't require the DataBar until the Jan. 1, 2010 "sunrise" date for the new barcode. The sunrise date was stipulated by GS1 as the target date for use of the technology, he said.
Top 10 Produce LLC plans to launch June 1 and has no clients yet, he said.
The company wants item-level traceability to be affordable for even the smallest growers, Bailey said. He said the concept was born last September as an idea to help growers in the Salinas Valley and was expanded to appeal to small growers nationwide to get economies of scale.
Item-level traceability goes one step beyond the case-level identification called for in the Produce Traceability Initiative.
Bailey said a significant challenge to the Produce Traceability Initiative's success has been the reluctance of small growers to adopt the GS1 technology required for participation because of the expense of the technology.
Bailey said Top 10 Produce will seek to maximize market penetration by providing the nation's lowest cost traceability solution for item-level traceability.
The company aims to have growers selling under the brand in sufficient numbers to enable Top 10 Produce to enter supplier relationships on behalf of its growers.
More information on the concept is available at www.top10produce.com, Bailey said.