I had a chance to visit a workshop on 360º traceability organised by the EU project TRACEBACK on November 13th. Traceback is an innovative EU project which tries to get the electronic traceability bit just right, using modern IT concepts and an integration of the periphery. They have demonstrated in two supply chains (tomato and milk) that their system is working nicely and have industry advocates such as PERMALAT who see real value in the system that has been deployed to them.

Still: the main discussion on the workshop was not about TRACEBACK and webservices, but about how to sell traceability to a hesitant food industry. It became clear once more that there is a dire need for cost benefit analysis that really is relevant, i.e. produces numbers that the industry can relate to.

It is clear that there are a number of business cases where traceability as an enabling technology makes a whole lot of sense. Food safety and enabling recalls clearly is not one of them. We have tried to sell that angle and the industry failed to buy it. Private industry dealing in traceability systems are still suffering from a resulting tainted brand" name.

Agricultural and Food Traceability Conference

You are invited to join the Iowa Grain Quality Initiative, the Iowa Beef Center, and Iowa State University Extension-Value Added Agriculture Program for the Agricultural & Food Traceability Conference on June 9-10, 2009 at the Renaissance Savery Hotel in Des Moines, Iowa!

An additional workshop will be held on June 11 for those who are interested in the specific details of the profitable integration of traceability protocols into food and agricultural businesses. Both events will feature speakers from business, research, and regulatory environments. Program content will emphasis three major topics:

• Risks and rewards of adopting traceability in business operations
• Standards, legislative actions and other compliance factors related to traceability
• Processes and management strategies which may assist businesses in the implementation of traceability protocols

The conference will serve as a state-of-the-art information source on the traceability of agricultural commodity products, agricultural and food supply chain management, and the verification of quality standards.

For registration information and additional details on both events, please visit the following website: http://www.ucs.iastate.edu/mnet/traceability/home.html

Marc Gunther who writes regularly in the Fortune magazine has recently posted an article called "Why Traceability Matters to Supply Chains". He doesn't refer to food traceability, but he does point out that the sustainability angle to traceability is important. Tim Wilson of Historic Futures is cited to say "If you don't know where your stuff is coming from. how can you have a sustainability program?".

This matches quite well what Charles Hurburgh said in his presentation on the last Annual TRACE meeting in Freising: that the big driver for traceability in the future would be accounting for the carbon footprint. How weel do we account for that in TraceCore?

TRACE will be represented on Research Connection 2009 in Prague during the next two days, i.e. from May 7th - 8th 2009. Heiner Lehr from FoodReg will represent TRACE in a press briefing on May 8th, where a number of EU funded research projects on food traceability will pitch their achievements to representatives of the press.

For a programme please go to the Research Connection website.