The very basics of food traceability

1. 1
Meeting the Food Traceability Challenge –
From Compliance to Opportunity?
Thursday 10 April, 2014
FHA 2014 International Conference
Andrew Baines
AsureQuality Ltd

2. 2
AsureQuality in Brief
• Owned by NZ Government; over 100 years experience
• Independent, impartial, third party agency; market access focus;
Internationally recognised accreditations and approvals
• Fully commercial operation; NZ$161M revenue FY12/13
• Delivering products and services to over 40 countries
• Work across the primary production supply chain
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3. 3
Supply Chain Assurance

4. 4
Traceability – What do we
mean?
• EU ‘food traceability’:
“The ability to track any food, feed, food producing animal or
substance that will be used for consumption, through all stages of
production, processing and distribution….”
This has become ‘one step up, one step down’
• US FSMA committed Secretary of State to:
“…establish a product tracing system to track and trace food that
is in the US or offered for import into the US.”
No legal obligation for internal traceability systems
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5. 5
Other requirement for
Traceability
• Regulatory
• Eg GFSI Standards:
- BRC
- SQF
- FSSC
- IFS
• ISO 22005:2007 “Traceability in the feed and food chain –
General principles and basic requirements for system design
and implementation”
• Many others

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From Farm to Fork
(or bottle!)

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Compliance
Traceability does not make food safe
• HACCP
Traceability enables unsafe food to be identified & tracked:
• Identification
• Record
• Recall, withdrawal
• Trial, mock
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8. 8
Brand Protection
• Compliance with requirements
• Market access; meeting importing requirements
• Voluntary; meeting additional requirements
• Establish trust
• In an event of (potentially) unsafe food:
- Communicate
- Track & trace
- Withdraw
- Recall
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9. 9
Technology
• Legal minimum:
To be able to record the supplier, the customer, product supplied,
quantity, dates of delivery, batch number or identifier
• Paper-based
• Electronic eg bar code
• Computer based eg ERP
• QR barcodes
• RFID
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Technology
10
• Advancing science eg
- isotopic mapping
- DNA sequencing
- mass spectrometry & gas chromatography
• Traceability but also:
- fraud protection
- contamination protection

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Traceability to Visibility
• Track & trace (Traceability):
Provide ways to ‘rapidly and effectively’ track & trace food so that in
the case of an outbreak…a product can be traced back to a common
source or forward through distribution channels.
• Visibility:
The ability to make data readily available to stakeholders, to enable
produce, components or products to be traced from source, through
processing through to destination.
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14. 14
Conclusions
• Requirements for traceability are here to stay
• Supply chains are complex
• Fast & accurate traceability can save your brand
• It’s worth investing
• Traceability gives visibility
• Opportunity to tell your story
Thank you

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