24 Food Traceability
Learning Objectives
Discuss the purpose and benefits of food traceability systems.
Introduction
What is traceability?
Being able to track the movement, transactions and environment information about food throughout the supply chain.
What is tracing one step forward?
- Tracing the food you provided to someone else.
What is tracing one step backward?
- Tracing the ingredients another person provided you.
Food tracing is crucial in the case of food safety in order to efficiently recall products and ingredients. It decreases waste and inefficiencies. Traceability requirements are increasing for all points in the production system between farm and consumer.
Some requirements of traceability are to:
- Link all raw ingredients to their suppliers
- Link all raw ingredient lot numbers to finished product codes
- Code finished products by lot number
- Link the ingredients of rework to finished product codes
- Link the ingredients in premixes to finished product codes
- Link finished product codes to the accounts receiving the product
Under the Safe Food for Canadians Regulations (SFCR), traceability requirements apply to most food businesses that:
- import food
- export food
- distribute or send food products across provincial or territorial borders
- manufacture, process, treat, preserve, grade, store, package or label food to be exported or sent across provincial or territorial boundaries
- grow and harvest fresh fruits or vegetables to be exported or sent across provincial or territorial boundaries
- slaughter food animals from which meat products are derived, where the meat product is exported or sent across provincial or territorial boundaries
- store and handle edible meat products in their imported condition for inspection by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA)
- sell food to consumers at retail, which would need to be traced one step back but not forward to the consumer
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Traceability can be divided into two key functions: tracking and tracing.
Tracking (one step forward) is defined as the ability to follow the path of an item as it moves downstream through the supply chain from the beginning to the end.
Tracing (one step backward) is defined as the ability to identify the origin of an item or group of items through records, upstream in the supply chain.
The main objective of traceability is the identification and isolation of any potential contamination source that will enable the return and withdrawal of such products from the market.
Benefits of Traceability
Food Traceability has many benefits. In the case of a foodborne illness outbreak or contamination event, efficient product tracing helps government agencies and those who produce and sell food to rapidly find the source of the product and where contamination may have occurred. This enables faster removal of the affected product from the marketplace, reducing incidences of foodborne illnesses.
Other benefits of a food traceability system include:
- redu