Improve individual programs
Clean, structure, analyze existing participant data to offer enhanced value from data
Support risk communication by visualizing data in effective ways to drive action, discussion, future focus
Support designing risk-based systems off existing trends
Accelerate & Improve industry learnings
Clean, structure, aggregate like industry data to accelerate solutions for all participants
Make accessible learnings that may have taken decades for individual companies to learn from
Use learnings to drive changes in risk, approaches, food safety metrics, and overall industry knowledge
Design a new status quo
Use big data and predictive analytics to design a more prevention-based food safety system
Characterize control, documenting the system’s baseline across numerous variables
Explore and focus efforts to understand where/when factors lead to increased risk
Innovating the new status quo. There’s a misconception with food safety data programs that the only valuable data point and interest is a positive pathogen, or failing test result. What conclusively does a positive pathogen result mean? It means the test method had a detection. It doesn’t mean that the process was out of control, contamination happened, someone failed, the product is bad and/or that the facility is harboring ongoing risk. The detection is just that, a detection. As new entrants come into GreenLink® programs, that is often the first thing learned: the positives are not the point. The point, and what’s more interesting, is what we do with these signals. What context can we bring to understand what they mean? What can we change for the future to improve overall? How can we make our system more resilient to sporadic and ongoing vulnerabilities in programs? Alone, test results can simply be noise, points in time that are used to tell a story that may or may not be true. These types of systems, collections of data points in isolation and/or without a designed purpose, are two things for certain— overly expensive and woefully inefficient. GreenLink® data programs are here for designing a better status quo, and collectively, we as an industry are investing in building the foundation for the offramp to a better, more efficient system. If we are successful, years from now the data we collect will look very different, and we will be using it to fuel a different system altogether. Do we know for sure where that will take us? No, but it is certain that continuing down the same road will get us to the same destination, and there’s a great amount of risk in that too. GreenLink® and the collective efforts of the grower and research community are ushering in a new era—leveraging past and present data to enable smarter, more targeted risk management, and to collaboratively shape future best practices and regulatory policy. The future doesn’t have to look like today—but using today’s data, we can cultivate a more successful tomorrow.
At less than four years old, and with over six and a half million data points, GreenLink® is just getting started in shaping the future of fresh produce food safety. It’s not about looking backwards at old data—it’s about using yesterday’s and today’s data (i.e., unrealized data potential) to look forward, change our data collection approaches and to drive more efficient risk- management systems. GreenLink® goes beyond a database and data sharing platform. It’s a broader initiative, one that is based on collective innovation aimed at designing a new status quo for risk- management. To achieve that, GreenLink® has three core priorities and/or products. First, and most directly, it is to help build usable tools to improve the existing data and systems that individual organizations use at their operations. The platform achieves this through structuring existing data, cleaning it, analyzing it and visualizing it, helping participants communicate where and what their food safety systems do today. Second, GreenLink® expands beyond the individual users, aggregating industry participants who share data to help accelerate learnings and socialize the value of larger datasets to identify trends, learnings and information. What may have taken years or decades to learn at an individual company is being learned in days and months—speeding up where focus and exploration is needed. Third, GreenLink® is focusing on building new systems to replace or improve the old systems—driving focused improvements through the use of big data and predictive modeling to determine more effective and efficient tools for the fresh produce industry. Think of this third product as the off-ramp to the circuitous loop the industry has been on, one where it often feels like the only thing consistent is that we are collecting more and more data, taking more tests and adding to checklists each year. GreenLink®’s most valuable project is to identify where and how we need to move to have the biggest impact and to design a more certain future.
15 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com April – June 2026
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