Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Journal of Antennas and Propagation Volume 2013, Article ID 531364, 15 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/531364 Research Article An RFID-Based Tracing and Tracking System for the Fresh Vegetables Supply Chain Luca Mainetti, Francesca Mele, Luigi Patrono, Francesco Simone, Maria Laura Stefanizzi, and Roberto Vergallo Department of Innovation Engineering, University of Salento, 73100 Lecce, Italy Correspondence should be addressed to Luigi Patrono; luigi.patrono@unisalento.it Received 3 April 2013; Revised 21 May 2013; Accepted 22 May 2013 Academic Editor: I˜ nigo Cui˜ nas Copyright © 2013 Luca Mainetti et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Te paper presents an innovative gapless traceability system able to improve the main business processes of the fresh vegetables supply chain. Te performed analysis highlighted some critical aspects in the management of the whole supply chain, from the land to the table of the end consumer, and allowed us to reengineer the most important processes. In particular, the frst steps of the supply chain, which include cultivation in greenhouses and manufacturing of packaged vegetables, were analyzed. Te re- engineered model was designed by exploiting the potentialities derived from the combined use of innovative Radio Frequency technologies, such as RFID and NFC, and important international standards, such as EPCglobal. Te proposed tracing and tracking system allows the end consumer to know the complete history of the purchased product. Furthermore, in order to evaluate the potential benefts of the reengineered processes in a real supply chain, a pilot project was implemented in an Italian food company, which produces ready-to-eat vegetables, known as IV gamma products. Finally, some important metrics have been chosen to carry out the analysis of the potential benefts derived from the use of the re-engineered model. 1. Introduction Te ability to track and trace complete information at item level in an efcient and trustworthy manner is becoming more and more important for companies, mainly due to the increased consumer concern over the safety and the quality of the purchased products. Tis is even more true for companies involved in the fresh vegetables supply chain, because the delicacy of fresh-cut products requires all stakeholders to organize their business processes as efciently as possible to guarantee the end customers the highest quality products. Te shif from quantity-oriented agriculture to new emphasis on products quality and people’s safety has placed new demands for the development and adoption of traceable supply chains. Traceability represents the ability to capture, collect, and store information related to all processes in the supply chain in a manner that provides guarantee to the consumer and other stakeholders on the origin, location and life history of a product. In particular, the adoption of an efective gapless traceability system, in the fresh veg- etables supply chain, could enable companies to (i) detect warnings associated with product contaminations quickly and accurately, and (ii) optimize their main production processes in order to reduce cultivation costs and to ensure, at the same time, production optimization. Furthermore, an efcient traceability system represents a fundamental tool for people with special needs, such as patients afected by multiple intolerances [1], who struggle every day to perform elementary actions, such as the choice of food, because of the adverse reactions that particular components could cause if taken. Te development of an efcient traceability system requires the introduction in the supply chain of the techno- logical innovations needed for product identifcation, process characterization, information capture, analysis, storage, and transmission, as well as the overall systems integration. Tese technologies include hardware (such as identifcation tags and labels) and sofware (computer programs and infor- mation systems) solutions. In particular, two of the most important auto-identifcation technologies able to optimize the critical processes in a supply chain are Radio Frequency IDentifcation (RFID) [2] and Near Field Communication