One-up and one-down.  You need to know where your products come from and where they go.  That’s the law in the U.S. with the Bioterrorism Act of 2002 and in the E.U. with the Common Food Law put into effect in 2005.

Let’s suppose you comply with that.  Hopefully you do.  This means that if an inspector requested that you show the source of an ingredient or raw material that went into a product, you could do that.  But at what level of certainty?  Would you have to widen a potential recall because you couldn’t limit the source to a particular batch or time period?

That’s why recalls are often so widespread and sometimes are expanded beyond the initial scope.

What you need is a method to positively link the “one-down” with the “one-up” and vice-versa.   Many people expect that they have this capability.

If you’re called on by an inspector to produce records of shipments or received items do you really want to spend a lot of time leafing through papers and file drawers trying to sort this type of thing out?

It seems obvious to many of us in the business of integrated systems and data collection and reporting solutions that a good integrated software and equipment solution brings many benefits.  With such a system, companies can streamline the process of performing traceability, and they can also reduce their risk and gain a lot of significant productivity and cost advantages.

Yet complete systems that provide true internal traceability are rare in the North American food industry.

There are numerous reasons for the lack of a good internal traceability system.  Probably many of them are due to the lack of one or more of the following required elements:

• Leadership needs to understand the value and make it a priority
• Corporate culture has to be developed to make it work
• Processes need to be defined clearly and the system needs to be aligned with them
• The solution must be adopted by all the parties who will interface with it
• Proper resources must be allocated
• The right technology (software and equipment) has to be applied
• Finances must be available

We’ll review these areas in more detail in later blogs.  As we do, it will become clear that in order to implement a true and complete internal traceability solution, it will take a lot of commitment and hard work.  But we’ll also show how it will be worth the effort and the investment.