Recently a news story was posted on Seafoodsource pointing to an initiative of fully traceable lobster in the South East of England (read more). In the picture one sees a lobster with a tag and the number "1" on it. A very local identification system I would say... The website features a "who caught my fish" feature which you can test by using L2 as the "tag code".

Now I really appreciate all initiatives resulting in more transparency of the food chain and if they are related to traceability, all the better.

However, "L2" is not a very good identifier. In fairness, I haven't seen the tag itself, perhaps L2 is only the last digits of a more complete, globally unique identifier.

Identifiers which are not globally unique make traceability people shudder, especially when they are used outside the walls of a company. It is not good practice to communicate such identifiers outside of your companies, because they can be mixed up with something else.

How? Imagine the lobster traceability system works so well that the fishermen want to adopt it for another species. Now they catch one lot of lobster and one lot of other fish. If you believe in simple numeric codes then you just call the first lot say L2 and the next one say L3. But then you end up needing an information system whether the information on the label actually refers to the right fish. You could also use L for lobster and M for mackarel and call the lots L2 and M2, respectively. But who knows what L and M means?

Multiply that by the number of fish species and of foodstuffs and you quickly realise that a globally unique numbering scheme would be the best. But who supplies that? (To be continued)