Fruit traceability system based on processing and grading line

In recent years, traceability system for quality and safety of agri-products is widely promoted all over the world. As the biggest country of fruit production in the world, China has a lot of fruit production and sale areas dispersed throughout the country and far from each other. It is widespread that stock fruit inter-provincially and cross-regionally, so the sources of fruit are complicated. Making fruits traceable along the whole supply chain is of great significance. In China, many researches are more concentrated on the simple ideal supply chain model, which transports fruits to the market directly following cultivating, harvesting and simple packaging procedures. It focuses on the producing procedures in large-scale agricultural cooperatives and product enterprises. Relatively, postharvest commercialization processes like grading, processing as well as logistics procedure are seldom covered.Fruit postharvest processing and grading procedure, which is the key proceeding of fruit supply chain, is a series combination of process and increment. Based on machine vision and near infrared technologies, the fruit automated commercialization and grading line is capable of promoting the efficiency greatly and accurately determining the quality of single fruit.Navel orange is a kind of representative fruit produced in China. Base on the comprehensive analysis of all the procedures and trace information along the navel orange supply chain, three factors give a significant impact on whether the small fruits like navel orange can be traceable along the whole supply chain. A detailed description of each factor is as follows: Firstly, the integration and decomposition of the supply chain logistics batch; Secondly, the conversion of the logistics unit before and after fruit commercial processing stage treatment; Third, the disruption and unsynchronized of logistics flow and information flow between the different entities along the supply chain.This paper presents a whole solution to achieve navel orange batch traceable along the whole supply chain. It includes three parts: information binding, information collection and information utilization. It consists of three systems: coding and identification system, traceability information management system and related supporting hardware devices. A detailed coding scheme is given in this study, which takes the current fruit production practical situation in China into account and is compatible with GS1 coding system. With reference to the GS1 system coding elements, we define the planting batch number, harvesting batch number, circulation code of the fruit boxes, circulation code of the assemblage and traceability code (both internal and external). The design of proper marking system to bind traceability information with corresponding logistics unit is the key step to achieve the navel orange full traceability. Due to the difficulty of identifying the navel orange individually, the smallest package of navel orange is defined as the traceable unit. In order to prevent mixing during postharvest commercialization process, navel orange boxes from the same harvest batch must be assembled with pallets before processing and the navel orange of one processing batch must be from the same harvest batch. According to the designed coding scheme, navel orange box label, assemblage label and traceability label are designed with one dimension 39 barcode and two dimension QR barcode correspondingly. Traceability information management system is developed according to different roles of the various entities in the supply chain, which is mainly divided into five parts: orchard sub-system, fruit processing and distribution center sub-system, supermarket sub-system, system management module and information searching module. Base on the B/S multi-layers framework, the whole system is carried out with C# language on the .NET platform.Nowadays the whole traceability solution is applied and demonstrated in a fruit processing and distributing center and its supply chain in Zhejiang province. The result shows that the solution can successfully make navel orange batch traceable along the whole supply chain with complicated procedures. But nearly 50% traceability information need more normalized and traceability precision is still need to be improved.