Traceability is the ability to follow the movement of a food product through the stages of production, processing and distribution. It has existed for years, although it has and does go by other names such as logistics control, inventory management and on the food safety side, involves product recalls.
Traceability, the documentation of product flows, is a means to make the history of a product available for inspection.
Primary traceability functions include real item access to the current product location, product status, the responsible worker for the product, the destination of a specific product and a list with the batch numbers and suppliers of the raw materials used to produce a certain products.
Traceability includes both traceback and trace forward. Traceback is the ability to trace a food product from the retail shelf back to the farm. Conversely, trace forward is the ability to trace a food product from the farm forward to the retail shelf.
Traceability is often needed to identify the resources of food contamination and the recipients of contaminated food in product recalls and seizures.
Systems of traceability are generally paper based although electronic methods are becoming more common.
The use do bar-codes to identify products, manufacturers etc., means that an electronic of traceability can be relatively easily sustained using bar-code scanners linked or downloading to computer system.
Traceability of food products
