Traceability:History and current drivers

From TraceFood

Traceability as a research area is a relatively new phenomenon. Up to year 2000 the word was hardly found on any Internet pages. Though it is still not an established word in some dictionaries, search engines now give you up to 5 million hits if you search for it. Both food safety issues and new business practice have put traceability on the agenda. A summary of traceability drivers are presented in the figure below.

In 2005, The European commission implemented several directives and regulations on traceability of foodstuffs. In addition to legal authorities, consumers and Non Governmental Organizations (NGO), retailers also demand that food producers must have systems for record keeping of process related parameters and traceability functionality in place.

Information frequently asked for are i.e.; source of raw materials, additives used, time/temperature log, production date and time, use of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), slaughtering and other processing conditions, animal welfare related issues, other ethical aspects like use of child labor and environmental issues. Such systematic record keeping requires a new behavior, which is a big challenge for all parties in the whole supply chain.

Food safety related issues, in particular several serious food scandals, started the traceability focus. One can list up; dioxin in Belgian chicken; E.coli 0157:H7 in Hudson Foods Company beef (USA), Mad cow disease, Foot and mouth disease, Scrapie, Asian bird influenza, and numerous occurrences of pathogenic bacteria like salmonella and listeria. In all these cases negative consequences could have been reduced if appropriate traceability systems were in place, and isolation of the contaminated batches made possible. It is also worth noting that "innocent" companies often get involved in food scandals. This is a key concept in traceability; if you are not able to document that your products are "clean", you might be considered as "guilty" and forced to carry out expensive recalls.

In the Belgian dioxin case in 1999, motor oil containing 1 g of dioxin came into a recycling plant for vegetable oil by mistake. The fat produced went into chicken feed production. Effects were not severe, but the scope was enormous, and at least 1600 chicken farms were contaminated. After digging into the case, legal authorities enforced withdrawal of all feed batches, chicken or eggs of Belgian origin. Since the industry had poor routines for linking of raw materials and ingredients to production batches, even "innocent" companies with insufficient record keeping had to recall their products. The result of this case was that the whole Belgian poultry industry had to close down - to a cost of approximately 1.3 billion USD.

Additionally, supermarket chains presently push requirements on traceability down the food chain. The influential and substantial retailer initiatives EurepGAP and Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) have really put ethical food production and traceability on the agenda. Food producers now experience more strict demands related to food safety, ethical production and documentation (record keeping) of origin and process related information from supermarkets than from legal authorities. The reason for this is that supermarkets have to deal with constantly more demanding customers and even more importantly; every day they have to carry out costly and time consuming withdrawals of contaminated food-stuffs.

Many will claim that food safety is the most important trigger for implementing traceability systems. However, with new business practice, where actors in the supply chain are being more and more integrated, i.e. they share internal production data, the access to traceability information recorded earlier in the chain is definitively considered to be a competitive advantage. A recall is defined as a publicly known, often publicly ordered removal of a product from the market, where as a withdrawal is a product removal initiated by the food business itself, often without anyone outside the company knowing about it. Both are costly for the company, and if a recall happens, the company image and brand image suffer as well. If traceability data is easily accessible, preferably on a standardized electronic format, the number and scope of recalls and withdrawals can be reduced, and in some cases, withdrawals can be done without public notice.

There is a clear trend towards supermarkets and other types of large buyers requiring that suppliers must have systems for electronic exchange of trade information. For these businesses, handling an enormous number of products and transactions, electronic ordering and payment as well as the ability to re-use data, is a major cost saver compared to manual practice.

Improved data recording, keyed to traceable units, gives us new and more meaningful data material, and can be used in several applications:

• Benchmarking of suppliers
• Benchmarking of own production facilities
• Production optimization
• Purchase, warehousing, logistics and sales

On the highest level, food businesses working seriously with traceability, documentation of ethical or quality oriented production practice and profiling of such, may over time benefit from this when building reputation and brands.