I'm in windy Winnipeg today and tomorrow for the "research & development conference & strategic workshop for agriculture and food traceability," as so noted at: http://www.umanitoba.ca/afs/trace/home.html. What does food traceability have to do with security printing and imaging, you may ask?

Security printing and imaging is the strategic application of explicitly printed information being used for product safety, messaging, interaction or other workflows (supply chain visibility, authentication, etc.). It is where the cloud, mobile and security come together; where the digital and physical meet and share a pint. So, what better application than food and agricultural traceability?

Say for the sake of my cadre of Irish colleagues and friends that we are indeed sharing a pint of Guinness. There's a lot in a Guinness, even if we only consider the hops, barley malt, yeast and water. From where did each of those ingredients come? What if a farm somewhere in Ireland had a high level of dioxins--it's happened recently...see my earlier post:

http://www.communities.hp.com/online/blogs/securityprinting/archive/2008/12/08/irish-pork-recall-another-track-and-trace-debacle.aspx

We want to know, when it becomes necessary, what the provenance of every ingredient in everything we consume is, right? No, I don't want it printed right on the package--there's too much information there already, and if I felt like reading something, I'd grab a Malcolm Gladwell before a Guinness, n'est'ce pas? But I do want the package to point to information, somewhere in the cloud (to use a suddenly trite expression), when I need to know.

That's traceability (in at least a simplified way). So, traceability is brand protection, it is security, and it is anti-counterfeiting.

The only time I want to disappear without a trace is when I'm...

...somewhere like this.

Cheers,

Steve