The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has launched a competition that invites submissions of inexpensive hardware, software or data analytics platform for monitoring asset movement across the food supply chain.
The New Era of Smarter Food Safety Low- or No-Cost Tech-Enabled Traceability Challenge, a part of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, aims to provide food operators with affordable tracking tools, the agency said Tuesday.
As part of the competition, interested participants from all disciplines will develop their own technologies or create a tool building upon existing systems and datasets.
Submissions, which should include a PowePoint presentation and a YouTube video, must be sent through the precisionFDA cloud-based computing platform on or before July 30th.
A panel of judges formed by various federal government representatives will select up to 12 of the highest-performing entries based on their innovation, affordability, scalability and interoperability, and ability to solve challenges.
The FDA will not hand out cash prizes to the winners, but will instead upload their video entries on the agency website. After the challenge's conclusion, the agency intends to hold a webinar to discuss information on the submitted traceability solutions.