I was recently asked to participate in the Harvard University Executive Session on Food Safety--hosted by the Kennedy School of Government--dedicated to enhancing cooperation and data sharing between the various components of industry and the agencies responsible for preventing and responding to outbreaks of food-borne illness.  It was attended by senior people from the FDA and State health agencies, as well as leaders from all points in the food-supply chain.  I was invited to provide some insight about how analytics might be useful in tracing products back to their origins in the case of outbreaks, and how such outbreaks could be predicted and prevented.
Interestingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the challenges aren't predominantly analytic, but related to data integration.  Think for a moment about what the FDA needs to go through to trace an outbreak:

From a set of cases, they need to track down where those who are ill ate or bought their food, and from each of those locations, track the implicated food back along its supply chain to its source, looking for points at which multiple cases converge to identify the problem.

If you’ve got the data on who bought what from whom and when, it’s a pretty easy problem.  However, the required data don’t conveniently live in someone’s data repository, but are diffused across all points of the food-supply chain.  Based on some quick googling, it seems that there are roughly 1 million restaurants in the United States and nearly 200k grocery stores.  They are sold to by a vast and complex network of suppliers, distributors, wholesalers, shippers and producers.  There is no standard for keeping shipping records, nor standard for describing which items are shipped—you wouldn’t believe how many varieties there are of a single vegetable there are, and how many more names those varieties go by.

The challenge of being able to navigate this data is immense—literally millions of different silos of information, much of it stored only in paper documents such as invoices.  Being able to do it under the kind of time pressure the FDA faces when there is an outbreak of food-borne illness is tougher still.
However, it is a tractable problem, and the session yesterday was a step towards a solution, and I’m looking forward to further sessions with the group.