|
UGPTI Student Presented Work at ICTH Conference in June
NDSU Transportation and Logistics student, Bukola Bakare, presented her work on food safety in transportation. Her paper,
"Traceability Mechanism in Perishable Food Transportation and Food Safety: Costs and Benefits",
describes Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) as a modern technology, an automated traceability system, that has proven its suitability for tracking and tracing in perishable food transportation. Among its benefits are the capability of transmitting timely, actionable data, tracking of food through the production, transportation and supply chain channel, and traceability for regulatory compliance. However, despite the apparent advantages of automated systems when compared with the traditional food quality assurance system, the primary resistance leveraged against it has been its cost implications. A Value at Risk with Copula approach is employed to assess the comparative cost-effectiveness of the two standard methods of traceability approaches. An out-of-sample Monte Carlo Analysis likelihood ratio is used to test for robustness. The paper uses a national-level data from the United States Department of Agriculture, where the probability of quantified losses associated with given average costs and the percentage of losses due to the implementation of the methods are obtained. The analysis reveals that, despite the high costs associated with the RFID method, the minimization of losses obtained offset the losses implied from the traditional method. Hence, the automated traceability is found to be more cost-effective than the conventional method of food traceability.
|
