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:
- reduced costs associated with recalls by narrowing the scope to only food that may present a risk of injury to human health
- protecting consumers against the risk of injury to their health from hazards in your food, and
- increased consumer trust in the safety of the food you sell.
Processes and Practices Enabling Food Traceability
Documentation
Documentation is the key component of any food traceability system. If some problem occurs, the documents can be consulted to track down exactly where the problem happened. Documentation will be discussed in the next chapter.
This video describes an example of a traceability system:
Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)
Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) deals with the traceability concerns.
Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP)
GMPs provide some definitions for determining whether food is adulterated (and thus illegal to sell) because it has been manufactured, prepared, packed or held under insanitary conditions. More precisely, GMPs help define whether 1) food has been manufactured under conditions that it are unfit for food; or 2) food has been prepared, packed, or held under insanitary conditions whereby it may have become contaminated with filth, or whereby it may have been rendered injurious to health
We can use the FDA’s GMPs as an example. The broad topics addressed in FDA’s GMPs include:
- Personnel: disease control; cleanliness; education and training; supervision
- Plant and grounds: grounds; plant construction and design
- Sanitary operations: general maintenance; substances used in cleaning and sanitizing; storage of toxic materials; pest control; sanitation of food-contact surfaces; storage and handling of cleaned portable equipment and utensils
- Sanitary facilities and controls: water supply; plumbing; sewage disposal; toilet facilities; hand-washing facilities; rubbish and offal disposal
- Equipment and utensils
- Processes and controls: raw materials and other ingredients; manufacturing operations
- Warehousing and distribution
References
Some of this information was gathered directly from the Government of Canada website. More information is available for free from https://inspection.canada.ca/food-safety-for-industry/toolkit-for-food-businesses/traceability/eng/1427310329573/1427310330167
Other sources for this section include:
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jfp/2014/421648/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00769-018-01370-8
https://www.ag.ndsu.edu/foodlaw/processingsector/rules-and-standards-for-food-processing
https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/about-website/website-policies