A DNA Test for Dinner

With all the talk about mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth disease, wouldn't you like to know the story behind that succulent-looking steak before you buy it from the store?

May 15, 2001; By Ruhan Memishi; http://www.iw.com/magazine.php?inc=051501/05.15.01ebusiness2.html

With all the talk about mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth disease, wouldn't you like to know the story behind that succulent-looking steak before you buy it from the store?

If Joe Dugan, CEO of World Commerce Online Inc., has his way, you will. WCO is a B2B exchange-building technology company that specializes in agribusiness, but it also has the ability to trace the entire journey of various food items and can keep track of such things as cattle afflicted with mad cow disease. It can also track the genetic heredity of fruits, vegetables, and other crops.

The Orlando, Fla.based company started out in 1996 as a bulletin board service for South American flower growers and then evolved into supply chain management. In August, it was prompted to get into agricultural tracking when it had to meet some European Union requirements.

The move to food tracking seemed like a logical progression for the company. "We already built the supply chain stuff, so, for us, it was a natural extension of what we were already doing," Dugan says. The Internet provides a perfect tool for collecting data.

Governments can hire WCO to collect the data so that consumers can know "from seed to feed to animal to meat to the shelf in the grocery store" exactly what they are buying and whether the product has been genetically modified, he says. Using the company's technology, a country can monitor where, for example, a particular piece of meat in a Netherlands grocery store came from and what process it went through. They can also find out if it was in close proximity to a sick herd of cattle.

From a revenue standpoint, Dugan expects the tracking aspect of his business to take off in the next couple of years. "Food safety is a huge, huge business," he notes. So far, WCO has secured contracts to sell its technology to the Ministry of Agriculture in the Netherlands and EUREPGAP, which is a group of European package handling and agricultural companies that are hammering out standards on how data, such as hereditary information, is shared and displayed on packaging.

Of course, governments can accomplish the same job on their own in more cumbersome ways, or they can hire other food safety companies that also provide certain pieces of food safety information. But the beauty of WCO's offering is that it's Web-based and gives everyone a common place to collect the data. "And whether it gets there via wireless or whether somebody faxes data in, it doesn't matter," Dugan says.

Once gathered, governments can do what they want with the information-they can store it, share it, or use it in some other way. WCO decided it didn't want to create and run a big exchange containing all the information. "We knew the government was going to want to do that," Dugan says.