Government agencies have joined forces to create an integrated "food cloud" application that quickly alerts authorities to food safety risks and allows for faster tracing of products and ingredients, the Executive Yuan said today.
The large cloud application links five core systems (registration, tracing, reporting, testing and inspection) from the Ministry of Health and Welfare (MOHW) with eight systems from the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Education (MOE), Council of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Administration. The effort to create the cloud was spearheaded by the Executive Yuan's Office of Food Safety under the leadership of Vice Premier Chang San-cheng.
Using big data technology, the food cloud gathers, shares and analyzes information in a methodical and systematic manner. To ensure the data can flow properly across different agencies, the Office of Food Safety came up with several products not intended for human consumption and had the MOHW simulate the flow of those products under import, sale and supply chain distribution scenarios. The interministerial interface successfully analyzed the data and generated lists of food risks to help investigators focus on suspicious companies.
Based on these simulation results, the MOHW on September 2, 2015 established a food and drug intelligence center as a mechanism for managing food safety risks and crises on the national level. The technologies for big data management and mega data analysis will enable authorities to better manage food sources and protect consumer health.
In addition, food cloud systems established by individual government agencies are producing early results. The MOE, for instance, rolled out a school food ingredient registration platform in 2014, and by 2015 had implemented the system across 22 counties and cities at 6,000 schools supplying lunches for 4.5 million students. This platform, which made school lunch ingredients completely transparent, received the 2015 eAsia Award as international recognition for the use of information technology in ensuring food safety.