Ham Radio: Italian Ham Producer Uses RFID
RFID makes up the pedigree of every single San Daniele ham, safeguarding the trademark internationally and guaranteeing its nutritional properties and traditional characteristics.
The Consorzio del Prosciutto di San Daniele was founded in 1961 with the aim of protecting the name of San Daniele ham. Today, its main function is to define compliance programs aimed at ensuring that the high quality standards of San Daniele Ham are maintained in terms of health and hygiene safety, chemical, physical, organoleptic, and nutritional characteristics of the marketed product.
Some 2006 data show its range of action: 29 associated enterprises producing ham, 5119 pig-breeding, 131 abattoirs, more than 37 million kg and 2.6 billion hams produced. This is the background where the Consorzio of San Daniele Ham has implemented the RFID system, necessary to better safeguard the trademark PDO (Protected Designation of Origin) and improve the efficacy of all actors involved in the "prosciutto San Daniele" PDO control system.
Operative procedure
The implementation of RFID at the Friulian consortium is developed through some operative processes that follow the PDO production chain:
- Breeding
- Abattoirs
- Transportation to the ham factory
- Ham processing at ham factory
- Great distribution delivery
The whole project is about the use of RFID tags, available on the Internet, as information collectors for each single ham: place of breeding, nutritional information, slaughter time, ham processing, and treatment at the ham factory and product placing on the market.
The certification process requires that, for each of the above mentioned passages, a tag (stamp/mark) is affixed to the ham by the operator/producer that is part of the production chain, guaranteeing so the compliance with the requisites of the production disciplinary.
RFID plays a very important role particularly at the third step of the production chain, when the leg of the pig is transported from the abattoir to the ham factory for the treatment process. At this point, the operator weights the leg, verifies its compliance with the PDO requisites and, in case the result is positive, the brand and the RFID tag are affixed to the fresh ham in association with the breeding code of origin (a tattoo with an alphanumeric mark). In order to carry out this "tag baptism" phase by writing all the information related to the ham (e.g., stock number, date of entry into the ham factory), there is a RFID reader nearby linked to an antenna that creates the tag to be affixed on the ham.
Today the data from the production chain are all conveyed in a unitary data processing system at the North East Quality Institute (INEQ) that, after recording all the data, allows managing and linking them automatically so that traceability and origin information is available for each ham in electronic format. In order to not change radically the way the ham factories work, the Consortium provides different criteria for the tag affixation, partially or completely automatised according to the loading volume and therefore to the size of the ham. The ham processing phase that is developed at the ham factory consists of different steps: salting, cleaning and trimming, washing, plastering, maturing, PDO branding, boning, pressing and slicing, and shipping.
The Consortium is studying the implementation of RFID at the beginning of each strategic productive phase. The system, consisting of Softwork RFID reader and antenna, is set on the course that the frames where the hams are put to rest after salting follows during the production phase advancement, in order to automatically trace the work in progress. The tag, defined as father-tag, affixed on the frames and containing all the information necessary to recognize the stock number, is identified when in transit, verifying the correctness of the operations. The tag retrieving data system affixed on the frames is able to know at any time which hams are being moved in the production advancement thanks to the previous association father-tag and ham tag.
RFID technological architecture
RFID system uses high frequencies or HF (13.56MHz), ideal to respond to possible future development of tag worldwide presence from the production chain to the great distribution and final consumers (thanks to the standard support ISO 15693 and EPC) and to deal with the difficulties of the operative environment (humidity and steel in production plants). High frequency has also an anti-collision function, it can identify a large number of tags at the same time and therefore, a large number of hams can be identified and traced.
Particularly the antennas and readers implemented belong to the RFID OBID® family of FEIG Electronic, distributed in Italy by Softwork, among which Long Range Reader, Mid Range Reader, palmtop RFID BlueTooth, and antennas of various dimensions can be found. The tags are a custom product, final outcome of tests and verifications, appropriately projected by Softwork to meet the dictates of the Consortium. Tag affixation modalities do not alter or damage the properties of the ham.
Achieved goals
Anti-counterfeit and traceability are the first goal achieved by the technological support of RFID, by the affixation of a unique RFID tag to each single ham that guarantees the originality and allows tracing back the ham history through the consultation of data contained or linked to the tag. The traceability within the production processes at the different ham factories also ensures production advantages for the economic efficiency and stability of the whole production chain, like monitoring the production advancement, the analysis of the production capacity, and the quality of the suppliers.
|
