Responding to traceability needs

Consumers fear the food they eat. These fears have grown as food production and processing has become more industrialised and food sources more distant. The scale and impact of food scares in recent years – from mad cow disease to dioxins and most recently Sudan I – have fuelled the situation.

These fears cannot simply be addressed by scientific argument, or by pointing to statistics that show food poisoning has been significantly reduced in the last 30 years. Consumers don’t believe they are being given the facts and are likely to react strongly – some say over-react – when they think that there is a problem.

The recent Sudan 1 food alert in the UK concerns an ingredient without any proven risk to human health but which, due to the precautionary principle of food safety, is illegal. The recall has been estimated to cost Premier Foods £100 million and there have been further costs due to the disruption caused. British products are now suspect on the world food market and are subject to special checks as far away as China.

New fears are also developing, particularly those relating to bio-terrorism. Naturally the politicians have reacted to the fears of the general public and, notably in Europe, have embarked on the program of food safety improvement which has been named “from the farm to the fork”. The General Food Law (regulation 178/2002), which was approved in January 2002, has now come fully into effect and this states that “the traceability of food, feed, food-producing animals and any other substance intended to be, or expected to be, incorporated into a food or feed shall be established at all stages of production, processing and distribution.”

The practical implications of these traceability obligations are enormous and the reality today is a long way from full traceability the length of the food chain. The pressure has already been reduced on food companies. A European Commission working group, with representatives from the food safety authorities across Europe, has concluded that the existing legislation does not make it obligatory to trace products internally within a company, nor to link incoming products and ingredients with those outgoing. However, various additional laws have been approved which extend the scope of traceability requirements and most experts believe that it is only a matter of time before internal traceability is made explicitly obligatory (as is already the case in Belgium).

The magnitude of the challenge to implement traceability throughout the food industry is immense. Each type of company, in each sector of the food business and at each stage of the food chain, has a different set of issues-not to mention differences in capabilities from one region to another.

Upstream and downstream

The traditional interpretation of the meaning of traceability in the food industry was the ability to find out the source and ideally the full history, of a product. Nowadays this is often referred to as ‘upstream traceability’, compared to ‘downstream traceability’ which is the ability to find the current location of a product-or all products-that contain a particular ingredient. Some people use the term ‘track and trace’, with ‘track’ meaning to follow a product through its life (downstream) and ‘trace’ meaning to find its origins (upstream).

Upstream traceability can have its challenges, but it is relatively easy. If a product is well labelled the source of the label can be easily identified along with the process origins of the product. The concept of lot labelling, which became obligatory ten years ago in Europe but can be omitted if the best-before date is included, was in response to the demands for upstream traceability.

Downstream traceability is harder to implement. If you want to know the current location of a product you can’t rely on the label, as you don’t have the label to look at.

The only way to accomplish this is to keep records at every time the product moves location. This not only significantly increases the record-keeping requirement but also implies the need to retrieve and quickly organise this information when the need arises-an almost impossible task with paper-based records, except with a low scale of activity.

The downstream traceability of products that pass through different companies has further complications. Unlike upstream traceability, where the information on a label allows you to leapfrog intermediaries back to the source of the product, the records from several companies must be joined together in order to reconstruct the traceability chain downstream. Current legislation obliges each company to provide their own records to food safety authorities on request, but this leaves the authorities with an extremely difficult job to piece together these records – since there are no standards on the delivery media or format of the records.

Identification and recording

The General Food Law requires that all food products be identified in order to facilitate traceability and this is, in any case, the starting point for any traceability implementation. The identification is used as the reference key to store and retrieve information related to the product.

This identification should at least be able to categorically indicate the product type and its lot of production or shipment. This is often achieved with a single reference number or code that can be used to consult further details. A lot should describe a group of products that are identical, in principle, having been produced under the same conditions and subjected to the same conditions subsequently (including the same storage conditions). Instead of creating a lot number, time stamping can be used to create precise lots.

The simplest case of traceability is when products are stored and distributed in discrete, packed units and do not undergo a later transformation or change of packing. The identification code can be applied via a label on the packing (for example, on a cardboard packing case) and this can be used by subsequent companies who handle the product.

It is slightly more complicated when packing containers are changed, or if packs are broken down into smaller units – a split. The traceability system should record the input identifier(s) and output identifier(s) and establish a link in the database between the two.

The same in reverse would be a combine.

Complications increase when processing occurs, such as in the manufacture of a product from several ingredients. The principles remain the same: all ingredients should have their own identification code (traceable back to a lot), and these should be recorded as inputs; the manufactured products are the outputs and are given their own new codes; the traceability system establishes the linkage and should also record the process applied. It is fundamental to time-stamp all records.

Continuous manufacturing processes can be handled in the same way as discrete lots, even though there is often not a one-to-one relationship between the input ingredients and the output products. Inputs and outputs are recorded and the traceability system establishes the appropriate level of linkage. A special formula may be required in the traceability system to establish the correct linkage between ingredients and product.

In the real world, there is no perfect traceability. Two or three batches of input ingredients may be used to make one batch of products. The tolerance in the manufacturing process may not permit very precise modelling of the appropriate formula.

Ingredients or products stored in bulk create particular challenges for traceability, as do liquids and gases. Firstly, it is difficult

to apply an appropriate identifier (such as a label) since the material does not have discrete packing.

The identifier is therefore applied to the container or pipe – in effect, the material is given an ‘indirect identifier’ through the identification of the container combined with the time of filling or emptying.

Several types of coding can be used for identifying packs or containers, but there are two key rules to be applied.

Firstly, the codes should be unique, i.e. never repeated for another object as this could lead to ambiguity in the traceability records. Secondly, they should be recognisable at later stages in the traceability chain by any system that needs to record or read information about the object.

Good industry practices are that the codes are globally unique (i.e. they cannot be used by another company) and that they are globally recognisable (i.e. they can be recognised by other companies, for the sharing of information and to facilitate chain traceability).

Identification technology

Currently it is still common that identifiers are hand-written or printed on a label in human-readable format only.

This has a number of disadvantages: usually the production of such labels is not carried out under computer control, so the link to other records is tenuous; manual transcription of the code onto a paper record or computer has a high error rate and the productivity of the operation is low.

For productive and effective identifier production and reading, the technologies of AIDC (Automatic Identification and Data Capture) are used. The most common of these is the barcode, which is cheap to produce, very well proven and compatible with readers already installed or within the reach of nearly all companies.

Unlike the barcodes on products sold in the supermarket, traceability IDs must be different each time they are produced. They are therefore usually produced as required by special printers on the production line or at the dispatch point of food businesses, although pre-printed serialised labels can be used.

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology is now being applied for traceability identifiers, although this is still very much at the pilot phase despite the high-profile directive by Wall-Mart that their major suppliers have to use the technology. The benefits of RFID are that the tags do not have to be on the product surface (therefore less liable to damage); they do not need to be visible and orientated towards the reading equipment and they can be read at high speed.

The disadvantages are that they are relatively expensive (low end tags are perhaps €0.20 each in large quantities) and that they require controlled conditions for good performance (for example, they can be adversely affected by the presence of water or metal).

Natural and artificial ‘bio-tags’ may be increasingly popular in the future, since they can be inside the food itself rather than on the packing. Already, DNA testing is used as a method for complementing or corroborating other methods of identifying animal meat, although the cost is too high and the testing time too long for this to currently be a viable method of identifying for traceability. Artificial bio-identifiers are under development, but mostly these are at the experimental phase.

Traceability systems

For day-to-day traceability, identifiers must be used by traceability software systems. These systems must store various records that have been compiled for traceability purposes and establish the linkages.

Although the concepts of traceability systems are simple, there are a number of practical issues that complicate implementation – particularly in the case of food processing. The technology of traceability is still young and there are few mature software systems on the market for this application, even though there are a large number of software products that claim to achieve traceability.

Many companies have implemented their own traceability software system – effectively automating paper-based traceability records. Others have extended their existing enterprise software applications, such as their Manufacturing Execution System (MES) software or their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, although these extensions generally just provide basic batch handling. A growing number of users of the SAP ERP system have also adopted the SAP traceability module.

Products are beginning to emerge that combine traceability with other record-keeping and control functions. For example, a system known as FoodReg provides operational execution of the HACCP plan at the same time as ensuring product and process traceability. This and another system called TraceTracker provide an integrated approach to internal and chain traceability.

Conclusion

The core technologies needed to implement traceability are not new, but practical implementations are still at an early stage of evolution and many companies, particularly smaller companies, do not yet have a solution.

The industry is only just beginning to understand the possible benefits of traceability. In addition to improving

food safety and avoiding market disruption – the objectives of the legislation – traceability can bring significant benefits to individual companies and to trading partners.

The first observable benefit is the improvement in quality control and logistics that results from more disciplined, detailed, record-keeping procedures. Defective products that used to ‘slip through the net’ are detected more easily and feedback on any issues can be pinpointed to the individual lot or time of production. Warehouse management is automatically improved, moving from generic FIFO management to precise product picking.

Paradoxically, although traceability implies a high level of data entry, the total amount of data entry in a supply chain can be reduced as a result. Once data has been entered into a reliable traceability system it can be re-used, both within the same company and downstream in the supply chain.

The detailed level of data provided by traceability systems makes it possible to study almost all aspects of business operations, from analysis of productivity of a specific process or production line to history-based predictions of customer demand.

The ultimate benefit will be a new relationship of trust with the consumer. With an increase in the transparency of information, consumers can look up an ID and check the history of a product – including full details on the ingredients it contains and the farming methods used. Japanese consumers can already gain information about the animal from which their chosen meat originates.

Full food-chain traceability, for all the challenges it offers, is probably the only way to re-establish consumer confidence.