With the increased media publicity of food recalls, consumers are becoming more aware of the importance of food safety and the need for traceability which involves tracing where food products come from and tracking the location or destination of targeted products in the case of a recall.
There are numerous traceability drivers including consumer interest, country of origin concerns, customer demands, food safety issues, brand protection, corporate social responsibility, and government regulations.
In the buzz these days around the concept of traceability, people usually talk about whole-chain traceability which tracks goods through the entire supply chain from source to end user (eg: “farm to fork”, “cradle to grave”).
One component of whole-chain traceability is the tracking of products among trading partners. This external traceability is what the regulations set out by the U.S. (Bioterrorism Act of 2002) and the European Union (1 January 2005, Regulation 178/2002) refer to as “one up/one down” traceability.
Food businesses must be able to provide records of inputs and outputs (i.e. “one-up” and “one-down”) within a reasonable time period. This one-up and one-down rule requires companies to establish and maintain records of the source and destination of products, ingredients, and packaging materials.
Now that these regulations have been in place for some time, the next step being focused on regarding external traceability are standards for interoperability so that trading partners can share information with each other about goods being transferred between their respective organizations.
In most cases, these regulations and discussions assume that internal traceability, the second component of whole-chain traceability, is already in place within companies’ operations. They either don’t mention internal traceability, or they leave individual companies to track products internally. In some cases they make a passing mention of the required linkages from incoming to outgoing products within an organization, but there are no specific requirements related to this aspect.
Many people, including company executives, believe that they have traceability within their organizations. They have invested considerable money in complex and costly Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and automation systems that are expected to track everything in their company, with traceability as an expected function.
Furthermore, companies have implemented case coding solutions to put bar codes and/or RFID tags onto cases and pallets of finished goods that should be (but may not actually be) scanned by an electronic device. With these systems in place, it is common for executives to think that they have a good solution for internal traceability.
True internal traceability, however, is quite rare in the North American food industry. The main reason is that most food companies, including large corporations, simply do not have the systems in place to be able to point to a case of their food products and identify clearly and quickly the specific source or genealogy of the raw materials, ingredients and packaging materials contained in that case by lot number, date received, and supplier. Nor could they take a source material and track it downstream through all stages of production and touch points to order fulfillment.
Whole-chain traceability depends on both external and internal traceability to avoid gaps. External traceability is currently a hot topic, but without robust internal traceability capabilities, the authenticity of whole-chain traceability is seriously compromised.
