For 100 years, Western Growers has stood alongside its members, supporting the advancement of agriculture through leadership and innovation. From navigating historic challenges to embracing modern solutions, that legacy continues today through initiatives like GreenLink®, a platform that redefines how food safety data supports public health and long-term industry viability.

Western Growers and its members have made a significant investment in the future of food safety for fresh produce through the development of the data-sharing platform, GreenLink®. More important than the GreenLink® platform itself is how the effort has been made and what it represents. GreenLink® came about proactively, looking for pathways leading to a prevention-based, less reactive food safety strategy than we have today. It is grower-led, with Western Growers members quietly investing time, money, expertise and optimism to innovate more effective approaches to public health protection and long-term industry viability.

GreenLink® was adopted without a known guarantee of success, and, as with most experiments, it has a certain element of risk associated with it. That can be scary and intimidating. But what often is forgotten when forging out into a new unknown is that the status quo isn’t totally safe either. In fact, we know from the current system that it increasingly leads to unfavorable food safety, litigation and regulatory outcomes. Recognizing that today’s status quo isn’t free from risk puts more emphasis on the value and potential reward of identifying a new, more effective system. Using GreenLink®, Western Growers and its members are investing in defining a more sustainable solution for fresh produce food safety, one that will improve public health outcomes while also offering pragmatic business outcomes in years going forward.

Facing uncertainty isn’t new for growers. Each day, this committed and resilient community chooses the uncertain path—the path controlled by often uncontrollable factors like weather, water and fluctuating markets, all in the effort to grow nutritious food and to be stewards of our soils for future generations. Risk is not an exception in agriculture— it is the norm. Growers innovating within that risk have developed a certain sort of specialty, strength and resilience.

GreenLink® started in 2022, anchored by a committed group determined to design a different and more improved future for fresh produce safety. Today, that effort has ushered in over 400 growers’ product and water data, houses three established data sharing programs—one run by Western Growers, one managed with the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement (LGMA) and one joint program with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). There are also many more programs in the pipeline, with three in near development. Overall, the system and programs have built improved data structure, expanded relevant data points for enhanced learnings, optimized analysis for patterns worth exploring and built community around learnings and next steps.

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.

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.