Park City Group President Randy Fields addressed food safety regulations in America at a Food and Drug Law Institute conference in Washington, D.C., Thursday. Fields was invited to speak to FDA officials, attorneys and industry experts for a registry The Park City Group developed that would track food from farm to fork.

“Right now, there is no great way of tracking food safety problems,” Fields said. “If there’s a problem, we should just push a button on a computer and track every ingredient all the way back to the farm.”

Instead, the current system uses a more arduous, hands-on approach to tracking foodborne illnesses like Salmonella or E. coli. And the more time spent trying to track the source of an outbreak, the longer contaminated food is picked up by unsuspecting customers, Fields said.

“It’s the crux of any argument relating to food illness; it’s a time issue,” said Aliza Glasner, the FDLI manager of product development. “Nobody can argue with that point.”

FDLI President Susan Winckler said the purpose of the conference was to focus on food law regulation and provide a forum to discuss food and drug law issues.

“We bring together lawyers in the private sector, regulators, industry members, consumers, anyone who has an interest,” Winckler said.

“I’m confident there were different opinions shared about potential solutions,” she added. “People are trying to solve the problem and bring different perspectives together.”

Fields supports private sector solutions.

In a report Fields wrote for the nonprofit, he claimed that every year in the United States, 48 million Americans become sick; 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die due to foodborne diseases, statistics he pulled from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Food recalls can cost companies millions of dollars in “legal costs, judgments, man-hours and damage to their brands,” he wrote.

To combat issues in the industry, The Park City Group has fully developed software, similar to financial software, and is currently gathering retailers and suppliers to pilot the program this spring. The software acts as a repository or data base that follows where any food item has been, allowing easier tracking of exactly where food outbreaks originate from.

“The level of interest we had was quite high,” Fields said about the software. “We laid out the idea, and intuitively it’s obvious. People are like, ‘Yeah, we should do this.'”