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“Food is the heaven for the people.” Today, when people generally want to eat safely and eat with confidence, food safety has always been the focus of people’s attention. The tainted milk powder incident is still frightening, and the incidents of poisonous turbot, poisoned rice, and waste oil that have occurred in the past still often touch people’s sensitive nerves.
Since there are loopholes in man-made supervision, can the IT system that has always been considered “rigid and demanding” build a solid line of defense for food safety? This has increasingly become a hot topic discussed by many food companies and industry experts. Even some forward-looking enterprises have already begun fruitful attempts. Qianxihe Group, once the exclusive supplier of cold fresh pork and pork products for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, is one of the best.
What kind of past and present life does a piece of ordinary pork have? The food traceability system can easily show this process and give customers a reason to feel at ease.
Pigs also need proof of identity?
In the slaughter workshop of Qianxihe Group, each pig is equipped with a card. This is actually the application of RFID technology. Each pig is handed over by which customer, when it enters, goes online, offline, warehouses to sell out, which market it is sent to, which customer purchases, and other links. Record it completely, and this is all part of the traceability system.
Qianxihe Group was founded in 1993 and slaughters 10 million pigs annually in industrial projects in Beijing, Hebei and Liaoning. These three branches are all modern large-scale meat processing bases with large scale, high standards, first-class equipment and technological processes.
In accordance with the requirements of attaching electronic labels to key foods such as rice, noodles, oil, meat, and milk, and establishing a traceability chain from farmland to dinner table and a food safety database, Beijing Qianxihe Food Co., Ltd. established the country’s first pork traceability system .
The company has established three breeding bases in Shunyi and Daxing in cooperation with the Beijing Food Safety Office and other units to carry out product traceability management in accordance with the requirements of food safety traceability. The system realizes the whole process tracking from the aspects of pig breeding, breeding, transportation, segmentation, meat processing, storage and distribution. Once the problematic pork is found, the bar code affixed to each piece of pork can be used to find out the cause.
For example, when a consumer buys pork from Qianxihe Group in a supermarket, it can be traced back to the manufacturer after checking the ledger, and then through the manufacturer’s production records and inspection reports, they can grasp the information during the pork production process, and then pass The pig source query system can be traced back to the source of the pig. In the farm, you can use the pig’s ear number to understand the information of the pig during the feeding process.
Niu Xiaohu, manager of the Information Department of Beijing Qianxihe Food Co., Ltd., who is responsible for the construction of this system, said that this system “on the one hand is to meet the needs of enterprises, and in the purchase of live pigs, it can prevent a certain real estate from being completely blocked due to a certain pig’s disease. Pigs can avoid economic losses. On the other hand, as consumers are paying more and more attention to the quality of consumption and demanding consumption levels, this can also meet the needs of consumers for transparent consumption.”
Inexperienced exploration
This retrospective and slaughter control system was first used in the Hebei branch in 2008, the Beijing branch was completed in the second half of 2008, and the Liaoning branch was completed in February this year. As a set of traceability system used in the group, Niu Xiaohu recalled the beginning, looking for a reference experience became the first problem they faced.
RFID has long been known as a technology. In animal tracking and management, small glass-encapsulated RFID tags can be planted under the skin of animals to identify livestock and monitor animal health and other important information. RFID technology can also be used for pigeon racing, horse racing identification, etc., to accurately determine the time of arrival.
Because of diseases such as mad cow disease, RFID has been widely used. In September 1998, the United Kingdom announced a cattle tracking system plan. The government stipulated that cattle born or imported after July 1, 2000 must be digitally identified. By the end of 1999, all EU member states had implemented this plan.
Starting from November 1, 2003, the United Kingdom began to implement a new pig identification standard; from January 1, 2008, Europe is compulsory for electronic identification of sheep. In addition, the British government also stipulated that from August 30, 2004, all horses must be identified and tracked.
Although there is experience in using RFID in the European Union, Australia and other places, because of the large-scale breeding methods, it is very different from the situation where there are still professional pig farmers in the country. “Moreover, selling foreign meat is not as complicated as ours, such as loin, ribs, etc., so we feel we have to explore it on our own.” Niu Xiaohu said.
Therefore, building a set of traceability system that meets business needs, is standardized, automated, and simple has become the goal of information technology personnel. The specific construction goals were quickly listed: establish an on-site collection system for product information of large and medium-sized livestock and poultry product processing enterprises in Beijing, and realize real-time upload of traceability information of livestock and poultry products; set up the food safety traceability of the Municipal Bureau of Agriculture-traceability of livestock and poultry products Subsystem platform to meet the urgent requirements of strengthening industry information supervision; building a food safety query service platform to provide the public with trustworthy consumer guide information.
The technical personnel must think from a technical point of view: the entire project involves coding and encryption technology, smart card technology (including contact, non-contact radio frequency cards, RFID electronic tags), one-dimensional and two-dimensional bar code technology, network and database technology, GPS global positioning system, remote video technology, POS handheld storage technology, mobile data system and short message technology, electronic voice technology, sensor technology, etc.
The traceability information code is used as the main basis for product traceability, in which group traceability is first solved, and then individual traceability is solved. And it is necessary to obtain quarantine information of breeding and origin through livestock and poultry identification and quarantine certificate, so as to realize the traceability of the animal in the whole cycle. From the entry of live animals into the factory, to quarantine, slaughter, inspection and trading, it is necessary to realize the retrospective management of carcasses after slaughter corresponding to their live animals. Due to the complexity of the slaughter process, it is quite difficult to achieve reliable traceability. At present, some common practices are to use barcodes on the track hooks of mechanized slaughter lines or animal carcasses for identification and traceability management, usually only batches can be managed.
In order to solve this problem, in practice, information technology personnel have found that it is necessary to establish multiple information collection points on the enterprise side. This is because the slaughtering process is usually complicated. Qianxihe Group has its own method for the slaughter of pigs: after the pigs are sent to the slaughterhouse, they must be kept quiet for 24 hours to let the pork chops clear; the pigs must listen before being slaughtered. Music, and “shower” with warm water for half an hour; the method of carbon dioxide stunned pigs without any fear and pain. This “euthanasia” avoids the appearance of undesirable substances in the pork.
After the hog is slaughtered, it will be “massaged” to ensure that the pork is fresh and tender. In addition, the whole process of slaughtering pigs is 45 minutes. The 48 knives used in this process are completely sterilized one by one. Every knife that each pig “suffers” must be sterilized after being used. The possibility of cross-infection of pork will be affected. Completely eradicate. Subsequently, after 24 hours of deacidification, the pork is cut, packaged, and sold out of the factory.
In this process, some pigs may only “take one step ahead” beyond the batch sequence due to the hot weather and other reasons. In this process, multiple batches of products will be mixed and staggered. Therefore, information technology personnel adopted a solution method of establishing information collection points at batch mixing points and obtaining corresponding relationships to avoid information errors. And all these work are based on reducing operating costs to ensure that the company can obtain long-term benefits.
The traceability chain does not stop
The food traceability system can realize the product information collection process of slaughter companies, product information uploading and monitoring, food safety supervision and consumer inquiries.
The supervision department uses the system to check and trace the label, quickly identify the source and authenticity of the product, and can use the system to quickly identify the security incident and the location, time, and person responsible for the incident. Consumers can use a variety of means such as mobile query machines and the Internet to query the quarantine data of livestock and poultry products provided by the national authority.
The software program developed by the Information Office can analyze the output data of measuring instruments such as electronic scales, rail scales, etc., and RFID sensors and scanners. Control with measuring instruments, use RFID sensors or barcode scanners to locate and identify the hooks, boxes, and iron racks that carry or contain products (these instruments have been installed with RFID cards and barcodes), and the products flow between warehouses and workshops At the same time, the output data is dynamically tracked, recorded, counted, and analyzed to ensure the authenticity and accuracy of the logistics data, and technically solve the management problems.
The management software is divided into multiple levels. The first level is the company’s internal production management software system; the second level is the company’s operation analysis system; the third level is the slaughter enterprise e-commerce platform and the supermarket and dealer operation management platform; The layer is the customer distribution management system for cold fresh meat, which specifically involves pig price comparison, product inventory, fund management, bill audit, product contribution, customer contribution, salesperson contribution, cost analysis, real-time analysis of business results, and more. According to Niu Xiaohu’s introduction, the first and second floors have been completed, and the design and development of the third floor have been promoted.
The Qianxihe Group directly-operated stores that are being opened in various places will also be managed uniformly through the store management system in the future. The construction of this project has brought obvious benefits to the company. The development and use of the system has improved the work efficiency of each department and saved labor costs. Compared with the previous manual operation, the pig slaughtering and settlement process saves 6 employees/branch. There are 18 employees in the 3 companies at the group level. The use cost of an ordinary employee is 15,000 yuan per year, and only this one link saves 270,000 yuan in labor costs. At the same time, the use of the software in other links also saves the corresponding personnel. According to estimates, when the three-tier software is used normally, the company can save more than 20 jobs per branch in statistics, counting, library management, and finance. It is estimated that the annual saving of salary expenditure is nearly 1 million yuan.
But similar to the feelings of many informatization project managers, Niu Xiaohu believes that no matter how difficult the problem is technically, it is easy to overcome, and the important thing is to change the user’s application habits. For example, the slaughter notice was originally filled out manually, but it was automatically generated after the system went online. In the early days of use, in order to ensure the accuracy of the data, manual receipts and computer receipts were run in parallel for a period of time, which inevitably made people feel inconvenient and increased their workload within a certain period of time.
But after the implementation, the convenience brought by it has made people more and more accepting of informatization projects. The launch of the entire project has simplified some business processes and made people truly feel the benefits of informatization.
In 2006, New Hope Group acquired Qianxihe Group to share the rapid development of the cold meat and pork products industry at a lower cost, and through Beijing Qianxihe Group to quickly realize the layout in Beijing, Liaoning, Hebei and other markets . The opening up of the entire agricultural and animal husbandry industry chain will not stop the pace of informatization.
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