The recent news about potentially unsafe levels of arsenic in fruit juices has reignited the focus on food safety and monitoring the food supply chain. Tonight, MIT will host a very timely seminar on RFID and food safety.

The RFID SIG event, “RFID Protects the Food Chain,” will be held at MIT’s Stata Center beginning at 6 p.m. RFID 24-7 will be there to bring you live updates on Twitter (follow us at @johnrfid247) and on our blog page. (Click here to register for the event.)

The event promises some very topical information when it comes to the role RFID can play in protecting the food supply chain. Sensor and RFID solutions are now affordable options for achieving comprehensive food safety monitoring, temperature monitoring and end-to-end visibility of the food chain.

Tonight’s speakers include Mira Trebar, principal researcher for the European Commission FP7 project  “Tracking your Food: F2F – RFID from Farm to Fork” and an assistant professor at the University of Ljubljana, Sloveni.

Additional speakers include Tom Reese, senior director of business development at Intelleflex, Anthony Grosso, strategic alliance manager, Hartford Ventures, The Hartford, and Dr. John Ryan, administrator of the Quality Assurance Division for the Hawaii State Department of Agriculture.

Ryan will provide an update on The Hawaii Produce Traceability Initiative, which began using RFID and GPS technology in September to track pallets of produce shipped from Taiwan. The pallets will be tracked from the pallet build level in Taiwan, although the program’s partners in Taiwan want to extend the project and tag produce immediately after it is harvested in the field.

“This is an opportunity to establish a working relationship on food safety with other countries and cooperatively develop the technology,” Ryan told RFID 24-7 this fall. “We think that in the not too distant future, something like this could become a standard.”