Company History

SIRA identified the need for improved food safety monitoring and safety measures when an outbreak of microbial contamination at a Jack-In-The-Box in Oregon became fatal. During the media coverage, SIRA, having previously invested in a safety-monitoring device related to detection of toxins in fish, contacted colleagues in federal agencies in order to comprehend the perceived events that led to the outbreak. Specific microbial contamination had already been established as the culprit by the agencies from whom a consistent frustration was expressed that tracking back to the food processing source of the contamination to prevent continuing incidents was difficult, at best. This SIRA discovery effort continued over several hours and was conducted at close proximity with a FedEx package in plain view. Hence, the ideal tracking mechanism, a barcode, immediately equated to a food safety tracking mechanism.

Soon after, SIRA contracted with the University of Arizona, and subsequently with Louisiana State University to develop a barcode food safety monitor and retained counsel for acquisition of intellectual property.

At that time, SIRA sought a process capable of sequestering food-borne pathogens through an immuno-chemical process filtering animal blood as it crossed beneath a barcode label. When sufficient pathogens were collected and stained, it would create a culling mechanism in the barcode that would stop the sale of the package. However, over time pathogens of greatest health concern began to mutate into more virulent strains and since any strain of any pathogen must be monitored with antibodies exclusively sensitive to that strain, a universal barcode label monitor for all pathogen detection would not be sufficiently effective or could be feasibly priced for mass market use.

With the emergence of peer-reviewed data that 3/4 of all microbial contamination in chilled foods was, in greatest part, the result of temperature abuse; SIRA readily enriched its relevant
intellectual property since a TTI barcode was always a planned secondary market item. The original bio-sequestering intellectual property remains and will be tailored for processing plant laboratory assays.

Having experienced a significant setback due to the global plague of microbial mutations and subsequent need to reinvent a decades-old paradigm for chilled product monitoring, in total, SIRA has invested more than ten years of research development and marketing technology in the field of manual and automated technology for food safety monitoring and, as a result, has significant industry and government relationships in these markets