Understanding food fraud, food safety and food traceability ought to be the fundamentals that every food companies ought to understand. A company can be implicated in food fraud if the ingredients used have been adulterated. In this article we explain how food traceability is crucial in managing your company’s brand image and how traceability works.

What is Food Fraud?

Food fraud encompasses mislabelling, substitution, counterfeiting, misbranding, dilution and adulteration of foods with the intention of deceiving the customer, usually for financial gain. Some food fraud cases lead to serious food safety risks such as the adding of melamine to milk products in China in 2008. In the 2013 European horsemeat scandal, foods that were advertised as containing beef were found to contain as much as 100% horse meat. Though this latter case did not pose any danger to public health or contain foodborne contaminant, it stirred the emotions and attracted the attention of consumers and industry around the world, revealing gaps and workarounds in the global food chain that retailers and brands are now scrambling to fill and fix.

What is Food Traceability?

Traceability is the ability to trace the history, application or location of an object [ISO 9001:2015]. When considering a product or a service, traceability can relate to:

1.   Origin of materials and parts;

2.   Processing history;

3.   Distribution and location of the product or service after delivery.

Hence, Food Traceability is the ability to identify the source of all food inputs in all the stages of production and distribution as well as trace the history of processing, application or location of each food inputs. Food inputs include raw materials, additives, other ingredients and even packaging materials.

Food Traceability vs. Food Safety

Traceability is at the heart of food safety. When companies can track and trace the food we eat – from farm to fork –they can improve recalls and share accurate product information that everyone can rely on, including the consumer. In the case of the European horse meat food fraud, although it could not have been prevented by traceability or standards alone, visibility into the food supply chain can significantly enhance a company’s ability to manage the risk by quickly detecting and removing unauthorised or potentially harmful products from the supply chain.

How does Traceability benefit companies in the food business?

The biggest benefit is quick and effective product recalls – as well as tracking and tracing of any food products. Data accessibility is important in driving speed of response and precision of analysis during a crisis. Traceability enables access to relevant data so that data can be analysed and decision can be made.  Companies that have a robust traceability system in place can speedily trace, isolate and recall contaminated products from reaching consumers, minimising potential public health risks and manage damage to their brand image. Since food safety and the ability to track products up-and-down the supply chain directly impact brand integrity and consumer confidence, it is crucial for companies to have a product traceability programme in place.

Recognising this, Walmart China has been actively applying technologies to supply chain traceability in order to create secure and unalterable records that can move through the supply chain.

 The need for unique identification and standards

At the heart of any traceability system is the identification of traceable objects. Traceable objects include the products (e.g. raw materials, consumer goods), logistic units (e.g. parcels, palletised goods) and assets (e.g. trucks, vessels, trains, fork lifts).

Traceability systems are powered by traceability data. Each time a traceability-relevant process is executed in any organisation, traceability data is generated. This data provides business content on: Who, What, Where, When and Why.

Diagram 1 – Generation of traceability data- single company

A system that is implemented to meet internal traceability requirements may not be able to interoperate with systems of other parties in the supply chain. In order to ensure an appropriate level of interoperability, organisations will need to ensure that their systems are all built on a common set of standards. This does not mean that all companies in the supply chain need to use exactly the same systems but their systems will need to be able to support standardised data.

Once a product has been uniquely identified and its information captured in an electronic recordkeeping system, the greatest value of standardised data lies in trading partners’ ability to share this information and “see” what’s happening along the supply chain.

Diagram 2 – Generation of traceability data- supply chain view

Traceability Systems in Action : An Example

Diagram 3 provides an overview of the supply chain. It illustrates how ingredients and packaging are supplied, transformed into products and distributed to the final customers.

Diagram 3 – Supply Chain Overview (An example)

To allow for traceability, each object (e.g raw materials, location, pallets) are given unique identifiers as shown in the following diagram:

Diagram 4a – Traceability Data Collection

As shown in diagram 4a , the producer harvests the crop and packs the products into cases. Each of the cases gets Global Trade Identification Number (GTIN) which is essentially a barcode. A batch/lot ID is also allocated. The manufacturer transforms ingredients into final products. To maintain  traceability, the inputs and outputs of the process are recorded on batch/ lot level. During the shipping process, to maintain traceability, the warehouse records the links between the product IDs (GTIN + batch/lot ID) and pallet IDs (SSCC).

Unique identifiers are assigned in every process. Diagram 4b shows the traceability data collection in the transporting, receiving and selling process:

Diagram 4b – Traceability Data Collection

With traceability data, when a retailer needs to find information about the origin of a particular ingredient, by following the chain of custody upstream, the grower can be located and the required information is retrieved as shown in the next diagram:

Diagram 5 – Tracing the source of grower of an ingredient

Similarly, if a product owner (or manufacturer) needs to locate products of a specific batch/lot that need to be recalled from the distribution network, by following the chain of custody, all points in the distribution network where the batch/lot were distributed can be identified, enabling a targeted recall.

Diagram 6 – Recalling A Product

If you would like to understand more about food fraud, food safety and traceability, join us at our upcoming talk on:

"Applying Global Data Standards to fight against fraud in the food and financial sectors"

Date: 2 July 2019 
Time:  2.50pm to 3.10pm
Venue: Interpol World Theatre, Sands Expo & Convention Centre

To sign-up for the talk, click here.