Application of Barcode Technology in the Quality and Safety Management of Edible Agricultural and Sideline Products
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Background introduction
The sanitation and safety of food is a major matter related to human health and life safety. In China, in recent years, as the news media and relevant government departments have exposed and investigated various food quality problems, food quality problems such as clenbuterol, poisoned rice, poisoned ham, and poisoned milk powder have been continuously exposed. The leaders of the central government and the people down to the city were all shocked. In April 2004, eight major ministries and commissions including the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Health, and National Food and Drug Administration jointly issued the “Several Guiding Opinions on Accelerating the Establishment of Food Safety Credit System”, and launched the “Food and Drug Reliability Project Implementation Plan” nationwide . Shanghai is my country’s economic and financial center. Although the production and sales of agricultural and sideline products do not account for a large proportion of the country in terms of volume, they have a relatively high degree of enterpriseization and scale.
A considerable part of the food has passed certifications such as “green food”, “safe and hygienic high-quality products”, and “non-polluted food”. However, due to the lack of scientific and effective information traceability of the production and sales processes, there are mixed products with fake certification on the market. According to a market survey, more than half of the “green foods” advertised on the market are counterfeit “green foods”, resulting in falsely high quality levels. The real high-quality, scientifically managed agricultural and sideline products also lack simple and detailed methods to provide consumers with reassuring proof, which makes consumers often feel distrustful when buying agricultural and sideline products. Although some companies provide information on product quality and production process on the Internet, the coding is not scientific enough. For ordinary citizens, it is inconvenient to query on the Internet, and it is impossible to query detailed product information at the purchase site or even before the purchase.
Therefore, scientific identification methods must be adopted to identify important production information of agricultural and sideline products, and rely on automatic identification technology and computer network technology to provide consumers with convenient information query methods, so that consumers can shop and eat with confidence.
From the perspective of national bar code work, an important content of the “China Bar Code Promotion Project” initiated by the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine in early 2003 is to adopt the ANCC global unified labeling system for food production, processing, packaging, storage, transportation, and sales. Effective labeling is carried out in the link to achieve the traceability of food quality. At this time, one of the key tasks of the key scientific and technological project undertaken by the relevant units of the Shanghai Municipal Agriculture Committee was to establish a Shanghai-centered and nationwide information platform on the quality and safety of edible agricultural and sideline products. Supermarkets and other shopping places have established a query platform for ordinary people to conveniently query the quality information of agricultural and sideline products and shop with confidence. We seized this important opportunity in time, intervened in a timely manner, and publicized the important role of the ANCC system and the benefits of its application in the production and sales of agricultural and sideline products to relevant units, and soon reached a project cooperation intention.
The purpose and significance of the project
The main purpose of this project is to establish a query platform in shopping places such as large supermarkets that allows ordinary people to conveniently query the quality information of agricultural and sideline products and shop with confidence. Through this platform, ordinary people can easily inquire whether an agricultural and sideline product is a safe product; agricultural and sideline product manufacturers can achieve standardization of the production process and ensure the traceability of product quality; the government’s “citizen project” can be implemented, and Intensify the supervision of the production of “vegetable basket” products to ensure product safety and sanitation from the source. The society as a whole will eventually form a good production environment for agricultural and sideline products, and production enterprises will change from passively accepting supervision and management to actively and consciously producing pollution-free, non-toxic, safe and hygienic agricultural and sideline products. This is the fundamental way out and long-term plan for agricultural development.
Design of coding and bar code symbology
There are many types of edible agricultural and sideline products, and their characteristics are very different. It is not a small problem to uniquely code them. To express additional attributes such as the production date, and to paste barcode labels on very irregular packages that are easy for ordinary people to scan, you need to choose the best encoding and barcode symbology.
1. Coding design
The barcode encoding of agricultural and sideline product safety information consists of three parts: the identification code of agricultural and sideline products, the date of production code and the code of production site, and the application identifiers specified in the GB/T 16986-2003 “EAN·UCC System Application Identifier” standard For identification. The meaning and coding rules of each part are as follows:
(1) Identification code of agricultural and sideline products
The agricultural and sideline product identification code refers to a stable and standardized “identity” identification code for a specific agricultural product trade item. It has the characteristics of fixed structure, global uniqueness, and meaninglessness. It adopts the EAN/UCC-14 code, and its structure is shown in the following table .
|
indicator |
Vendor identification code and agricultural and sideline product item code |
Check code |
|
9 |
N2 N3 N4 N5 N6 N7 N8 N9 N10 N11 N12 N13 |
N14 |
(2) Production date code
The production date code is used to indicate the production date of agricultural and sideline products, such as the slaughter date of pigs, the date of picking vegetables, etc. The coding structure adopts the YYMMDD format, and the application identifier is AI (11).
(3) Production site code
The production site code is used to indicate the production site of agricultural and sideline products, such as pig barn number, vegetable planting field number, and edible fungus cultivation warehouse number. The coding rules are determined by the manufacturer, but the manufacturer should ensure that they are in the same cultivation cycle The cultivation process of all agricultural and sideline products with the same number (including the epidemic prevention process of pigs, the fertilization process of vegetables, etc.) is exactly the same. The code consists of 6 digits, letters or a mixture of numbers and letters. If the production site code is less than 6 digits, the high digits are filled with “0”. The application identifier of the production site code is AI(10).
2.Barcode symbology
The barcode symbol for agricultural and sideline product safety information adopts the UCC/EAN-128 barcode specified in the GB/T 15425-2002 “EAN·UCC System 128 Barcode” standard. For example, the bar code symbol representation of the pork code described in the previous section is shown in the figure.
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Example of barcode for agricultural and sideline product safety information
The bar code symbol level should be no less than 1.5 (the measuring light wavelength is 670±10nm), and the bar height should be no less than 10.0mm.
Barcode label printing solution
The direct users of the edible agricultural and sideline product safety information query platform are the general public, and it is impossible to train them in bar code scanning operations in advance. Therefore, designing the most easy-to-scan bar code label is one of the keys to this project. At the same time, almost all agricultural and sideline products covered by the platform are irregularly packaged, and some products (such as vegetables) do not even have any packaging at all. Therefore, in order to make the barcode label easy to scan, it is necessary to make the label as short as possible on the premise that the quality of the barcode symbol meets the requirements, so that the deformation of the barcode symbol is small. This means that high-resolution printers should be used as much as possible when choosing a barcode printer, and there should be stricter requirements on the quality of the printed ribbon.
The bar code label is printed by the production enterprise calling the standardized production management system database before the agricultural and sideline products leave the factory. Since these companies are basically in remote suburbs, the temperature and humidity conditions of the barcode printing environment are relatively poor, and the printing operators are not well educated, so the stability of the barcode printer is required. Otherwise, once a malfunction occurs, even if one day is delayed, it may seriously affect the market timing of agricultural and sideline products.
Based on the above factors, one of the most stable barcode printers on the market is selected: ZEBRA Z4M PLUS industrial barcode printer.
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The temperature and humidity conditions of the barcode printing environment for this project are relatively poor. In Shanghai, the temperature of the printing environment in winter is usually around 0℃, the warm-up time is very long, and the printing effect is also affected to a certain extent. Therefore, the barcode printer is reminded to take appropriate measures to appropriately increase the ambient temperature in use.
The nominal size X of the minimum unit width of the bar code symbol should be just right. If you choose a print head with a resolution of 200dpi, the theoretical size of each dot is 5.0mil. At this time, if the X size is selected as 5.0 mil, the bar code symbol quality is poor and decoding is also difficult; if the X size is selected as 10.0 mil, the bar code symbol is too long, and it is easy to deform when attached to agricultural and sideline products, which affects the reading. After analysis and actual printing, and bar code quality inspection, the print head with a resolution of 300dpi is selected, and the theoretical size of each dot is 3.33mil. At this time, the X size can be selected as 6.7mil, and the quality of the barcode symbol actually printed reaches B/03/660, and the quality of the barcode symbol is higher. In this way, the length of the bar code symbol is greatly shortened, and the length of the symbol including the blank area does not exceed 5 cm, which reduces the possibility of deformation of the bar code symbol after being pasted on the agricultural and sideline products, the reading success rate is significantly improved, and the consumer response is good.
Although the barcode printer can print the selected UCC/EAN-128 barcode, considering that the data source of the barcode is a fixed-format database and does not require the operator to set the barcode symbol on the printing site, the UCC/EAN-128 is specifically designed. The EAN-128 barcode printing module is embedded in the management database of the edible agricultural and sideline product manufacturer, and the barcode printing operator directly prints the barcode label from the management database.
Barcode symbol scanning and information query
Agricultural and sideline product manufacturers will stick barcode labels on the corresponding products according to the product type, production date, and production location before the product leaves the factory. In supermarkets, when consumers purchase agricultural and sideline products with safety information barcodes, if they want to know the details of the products, they can scan the barcode labels on a dedicated scanning platform before paying to query the quality information of the products.
In order to enable citizens without any training to easily scan the security information barcode, after repeated trials, the PSC Magellan 2200VS multi-line code reader was selected. The reader supports the identification of UCC/EAN-128 bar codes, so it satisfies the needs of this project. Embed the barcode reader on the scanning platform.
System operation
The Shanghai edible agricultural and sideline product quality and safety information inquiry platform was put into trial operation on New Year’s Day in 2004. After continuous improvement, it has now been widely promoted and applied. More than 100 kinds of edible agricultural and sideline products closely related to the citizens’ “vegetable baskets” and “rice bags”, including pork, chicken, eggs, rice, vegetables, and edible fungi, have been labeled with safety information barcodes. There are more than 50 hypermarkets installed with the query platform, including domestic supermarkets such as Agriculture Industry and Commerce, Lianhua and Hualian, as well as foreign supermarkets such as Haoyouduo and Carrefour.
After the safety information barcode is affixed to agricultural and sideline products, consumers can learn more about the production process information and inspection information of the product when purchasing, which greatly increases their confidence in product quality and safety and improves their trust in branded products. After the supermarket installs the information query platform, it will help create a good and reassuring shopping environment, improve its own product quality management level and corporate image, better attract consumers, and improve competitiveness. Through joint efforts with relevant government departments, we have also added product-related QS certification information and anti-counterfeiting information to the query platform to enable consumers to have a more comprehensive understanding of agricultural and sideline products.
For agricultural and sideline products manufacturers, after their products are labeled with safety information barcodes, they can promptly and fully show consumers their own advanced, scientific, and strict quality management level and product grades, thereby attracting more consumers. Improve competitiveness.
Implementation Effect
After the establishment of the Shanghai edible agricultural and sideline product safety information inquiry platform, it immediately attracted widespread attention from Shanghai’s leaders and relevant media. Secretary of the Municipal Party Committee Chen Liangyu said that the construction of the platform has solved a worry of the municipal government, is conducive to the expansion of agricultural industrialization, the promotion of the brand, and the sales of agricultural and sideline products. The people can also eat at ease. Deputy Mayor Yan Junqi pointed out that this is a successful combination of barcode technology and agricultural and sideline product production, and a breakthrough in the application of barcode technology. During the “bird flu” epidemic, when the World Health Organization visited Shanghai, it also personally went to the supermarket to conduct field investigations on the edible agricultural and sideline product inquiry system. Relevant persons in charge of the fraternal provinces and cities have also come to Shanghai for inspection and hope for further cooperation. At present, this achievement has been promoted and applied in some cities in the Yangtze River Delta.
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