Resources for Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI)

If you are in the produce business and sell to Wal-Mart, you are either relaxing after getting all your compliance issues sorted (or have organized an exception with the buyer) or you are in a bit of a panic since there is no time left before the PTI mandate comes into effect.

Whichever group you are in, the New Year might be a good time to review your PTI labeling operations and ensure that everything is in good shape for moving forward.

Here at ID Technology, we’ve been involved with helping clients get into PTI compliance for some time and have a ton of successes. I thought it might be helpful for anyone still working on this to put together a list of helpful resources to make your job easier.

The Produce Traceability Initiative website is a great place to start. There is a lot of great educational information there. Another good standards resource is the GS1 Produce page.

If you are looking to get started with PTI, one of the first things you are going to do is be able to generate the PTI labels. There are several ways to get started, the simplest might be to look at the free, cloud based system recently launched by NiceLabel

This is a great solution (and you can’t beat the price) if you are taken by surprise and need labels NOW! You just type your product info into the form on the NiceLabel website and print your compliant labels.

As you’d expect, there are some limitations with this. The system only deals with the case labels (if you need pallet labels, you need to get the desktop version of NiceLabel – which we’d be happy to supply) and it is completely manual, you have to type the data into the form each time. Need database connectivity? Again, we’ll be happy to provide you with a desktop version of the software.

Use BarTender software? Sometime ago I made up a free template for the PTI case label to work in BarTender. This needs the current version of BarTender (yes, we sell that, too) and can be linked to most types of database or ERP software.

Should you be looking for a completely integrated PTI solution, you might want to look into one of the businesses that specialize in this. Companies that we have built relationships with include:

Vision Sort http://visionsort.org/

HarvestMark http://www.harvestmark.com/

RedLine Solutions http://www.redlineforproduce.com/

Spokane Software http://www.sssonline.com/

These companies all have in depth knowledge of the PTI rules as well as experience integrating with other systems.

Of course, once the software solution is in place, you’ll need labels, label printers and label printer applicators. With hundreds of working PTI installs, ID Technology can help every step of the way with this.

Where ever you are in your PTI compliance plan, I hope some of these resources are helpful. Want to talk PTI in detail? Call me at 603-598-1553 x237 or use the Contact Form. We can get you in touch with a knowledgeable specialist in your area right away so you can get ID Technology on your PTI team!