Food Traceability: Benefits Beyond Regulatory Compliance

Leading food enterprises have recognized the value of internal traceability for years. Now, smaller and more nimble competitors are reaching the same conclusion. At the same time, food businesses — from production farmers to retailers — continue to ask, “What is this external, whole-chain traceability thing and why should I care?”

Internal traceability occurs within individual businesses. The effectiveness of an organization’s traceability processes is generally measured by the extent to which its practices and systems help users make informed decisions and monitor their impact.

External traceability goes outside the individual firm and is built on internal traceability. However, the effectiveness of whole-chain traceability is reliant on the integrity and relevance of gathered, stored, and shared data. The interoperability of the systems being used also plays a role in external traceability, but that is another topic for another day.

What makes external traceability valuable?  Well, in the past, traceability was driven by government regulation or at least the threat of regulation. When an entire food sector — tomatoes or processed meats, for example — is threatened due to foodborne illness that cannot be traced back to its origins, regulators instinctively want to step in and mandate “better traceability.” This is because the process of gathering and cross-referencing disparate data from multiple sources takes days, weeks, even months. As more citizens become ill, the pressure to quickly come up with an answer, any answer, is intense.

Governments quite naturally react to this pressure. In return, the business seeks to mitigate potential increased costs of a regulated approach by voluntarily changing its processes and systems to improve the reliability and speed with which investigators can trace and track products throughout the chain. This is done in the true desire to improve reliability and responsiveness. However, it is not an especially strategic approach.

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