Adoption of RFID for Enhanced Food Safety Management: A Qualitative and Explorative Approach

In many countries, food safety crisis can negatively impact public welfare as well as political stability. In over the past tow years, three government agencies and major food companies in South Korea have implemented a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) project intended to explore and investigate the opportunities and challenges of RFID technology in the areas of instant food manufacture and supply management. This article reports on the successful practices and lessons learned of such project and antecedents of both enablers and inhibitors of acceptance and usage of the system through structured group interview. Among the findings are that item level tagging requires detailed and customized guidelines; standardized system development procedures among stakeholders is critical to the success of RFID implementation; information quality and information related system quality are more important than technical system quality in adopting the systems; factors that have been treated as enablers are identified as inhibitors in this context.