The Institute of Food Technologists has published a report prepared for the FDA on recommendations for food traceability in the US. Interestingly enough, IFT recommends that electronic data must be delivered to the FDA in case of an enquiry, but only after 24h. The format of the data is not prescribed, nor the system where such data should be stored. Food companies should be allowed to use paper records if they wish to do so, but the paper records need to be passed to an electronic format regularly (such as every day). Third parties can provide that service.
The recommendation are also very clear that internal traceability needs to be established. In their own words: "The ability to trace products internally accurately must be maintained by food companies." This is a great advancement over the European one step up, one step down system without internal traceability. I would also say that it is a clear message to those who believe that internal traceability is an optional add-on to the traceability equation.
An exciting new element in the recommendations is that of a mandatory traceability audit. This will not be liked by the industry, but makes a whole lot of sense. The main challenge in food traceability today are the myths that surround it, like the "red tape myth" and the "I have it" myth. A mandatory audit for food businesses would be a real eye opener.
The IFT report recognises that there is going to be a cost to the industry, but hopes to minimise that by the advantages that traceability brings to the companies.
Implementing the practices recommended by IFT will have an economic cost to the industry, but may also have benefits, including improved supply chain management, inventory control, access to contracts and markets, more targeted recalls and hence lower costs to recall. Firms could also benefit by protecting brand name, maintaining consumer confidence, and reducing possible liability claims. Furthermore, product tracing could allow the exclusion of a firm’s product from an investigation. A rapid response to an accidental or intentional contamination or other triggering event through improved product tracing would yield social benefits beyond the direct benefits and cost reductions to the firms.
This will probably not convince most food companies who have shown a lot resistance to fully adopt traceability, in spite of the above benefits.
A recent study by Andres Silva of the University of Kent has shown that there are potentially huge benefits for the sourcing process if basic data is known about the raw materials in the warehouse. By using the "oldest" batches first, the average time in the warehouse can be reduced quite significantly which should result in less non-compliances, less waste and better customer relationships. Mr Silva has not yet produced an economic study to express the benefits in currency, something that would be direly needed.
The US is about to get organised in terms of food traceability. So far, the approach seems interesting and certainly more advanced than most countries. It will be interesting to follow the process and see the reaction of the food industry to the new regulations.
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.
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)
While the EU is still stuck with the (in)famous "one step up, one step down" system, the US is moving fast to become the international leader in food traceability.
Sue Browning reports:
Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has introduced S. 425 to establish a national traceability system for all food under the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) jurisdiction. This proposed legislation would require, “a traceability system … for all stages of manufacturing, processing, packaging and distribution of food.” The bill further states that, “Electronic records identifying each prior sale, purchase, or trade of the food and its ingredients, and establishing that the food and its ingredients were grown, prepared, handled, manufactured, processed, distributed, shipped, warehoused, imported, and conveyed under conditions that ensure the safety of the food. The records should include an electronic statement with the date of, and the names and addresses of all parties to, each prior sale, purchase, or trade, and any other information as appropriate.”
The idea behind one step up, one step down is fine. Businesses should be responsible for what they are doing and should organise themselves in order to ensure that black sheep are kept out of sight. However, that doesn't quite work that well, if the industry is not convinced of the value of traceability. Selling traceability as a food scare antidote didn't work and the term got burned.
One step up, one step down is not a robust system. If only one link in the chain fails, chances are that you are never going to find the rest of the chain. This is especially worrying because the "bad guys" are usually those who are not very interesting in book keeping either.
Complementing a one step up, one step down system with a (electronic) monitoring system, where only mandatory data is held and which is removed from the hands of non-essential government officials (especially the tax authority) is a much more robust system, which doesn't do anything when everything is fine, but jumps into life once there is indeed a problem.
Vietnam is thinking along those lines and we very much appreciate this modern approach to traceability. Europe will have to rethink its strategy unless in some future it wants to face export restrictions because of lacking traceability.
We are pleased to announce that we have started our consultancy project in Vietnam. Over the next months we are going to study in depth Vietnamese aquaculture shrimp and tra catfish traceability in the An Giang and the Ben Tre provinces. It is our goal to add these provinces to the traceability community by designing a simple, yet effective traceability system for them. Of course this a real challenge where much of the shrimp production actually comes from very small farms (roughly 500,000-600,000 of them!). We are currently meeting relevant people in the ministries in Hanoi and move on Wednesday to the field.
FoodReg, TraceTracker and other colleagues have been interviewed recently by Mason Inman to understand food traceability better. Under the title “Fifty ways to interrogate your dinner” he has then published an article in the June 16th, 2009 edition of the New Scientist, an accomplished magazine for the dissemination of science. The New Scientist, being published in paper now for over 50 years, attracts about 2 million users each month for its electronic publication and another 800,000 for its printed edition. Mason has done a pretty good job in summarising traceability and the determination of origin, so it is probably worthwhile to have a look at the original article.
Getting a traceability system that works alright is not a simple thing, especially on a country or even region basis. In a recent report from the Irish agricultural committee, they condemned the current system in Ireland because it was not able to react correctly to last year's dioxin in pork scandal. For a 10% infection rate, the report says, a 100% recall was made. This cost the country about 100 million EUR, hardly a small sum.
These are of course complicated matters. However, I believe that with a 16 point step-by-step programme which I have recently put together on some slides, countries like Ireland could have a workable traceability system for much, much less money.
Hopefully BrightAnimal, our recently launched EU project on Precision Livestock Farming, will help in working out the recommendations a little better. (Stay tuned for the web, it's not working yet.)
In a recent article the FoodNavigator.com has reported that Greenpeace is accusing large supermarket chains to purchase beef products from Brazilian companies that practice illegal deforestation. The companies have denied these claims and pointed to their traceability systems to prove it.
We wholeheartedly welcome this news item, as it shows another use of traceability. Traceability is --as we have stated many times-- really accounting and should be used in exactly this way.
Just a little thought, though: in sustainability (an area which more and more requires traceability) there are several efforts made globally to make companies transparently show their efforts in the area of economic, environmental and social sustainability. The Global Reporting Initiative (www.globalreporting.org) is just one of them.
Perhaps a similar thing should be done to food production? Transparent food production could be a very interesting move for food companies. Similar movements from other areas (think linux and other open software) could indicate that this might be viable.
The brand-new EU coordination project BrightAnimal on Precision Livestock Farming was launched last week in Halifax, UK. The project will in the next two year try to come up with a framework for acceptable and practical precision lifestock farming and produce a book and 4 very practical guides for farmers how to use such techniques for their benefit.
The opening conference was attended by a very international audience with very broad background. Lively discussion on technology, economics and social aspects were mixed with presentations from a large variety of stakeholders. The conference was highly successful in discussing relevant subject and initiating a world-wide network of stakeholders in Precision Livestock Farming.
The undersigned is the Technical Coordinator of the project and leads the activity on traceability. Here is a presentation which you might find interesting. If you do, please let me know. We are trying to come up with some that really makes sense, so don't hold back!
says David Byrne, former European Union Commissioner of Health and Consumer Protection (read the full article here).
In a recent presentation I have posed the question of voluntary traceability schemes and I have pointed out that we haven't seen much progress in traceability since the EU regulation 178/2004 was put into place. The food industry has not been presented with an convincing argument and traceability got somewhat burned by focussing only on the food safety aspect. The industry is however much more interested in efficiency and cost reduction than safety given that most companies already control their food production very well.
In the presentation I develop 16 milestones towards a global traceability system. One of them concerns governments pushing stricter regulations and financing core components and rollout of traceability systems.
In some sense I am being pessimistic about voluntary traceability schemes, recognising that in some contexts (Norway for example) this might work.
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.
In an interesting initiative Canada's province of Ontario has launched Growing forward a grant programme for implementing traceability systems. Crop or animal farmers as well as food processors can apply for grant of maximum 20,000C$ to implement either a traceability programme (written or electronic) or a food safety programme.
We trace! can only applaud such an initiative and hope that similar ones will be made in the rest of the world.
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?
Nobody doubts that food labelling is a complicated thing. In one of the later initiatives, the food industry makes an attempt to identify nutritional contents of food products and percentages thereof with respect to the Guideline Daily Amount or GDA. What probably started out as a real step towards educating consumers to eat better, has turned into a smokescreen activity of the food industry argues the "Stop GDA" initiative. In a video and on their web site they bring forward 10 arguments why the labelling should be dropped altogether in favour of other alternatives. While perhaps the industry is not as malevolent as the initiative insinuates, it clearly is worried about negative effects on their business. Who would buy a soft drink that contains 120% of the recommended daily intake of sugar?
Well, should you produce such a food is the counterquestion. Now the truth is of course that nobody expects soda, potato crips and similar foods to be healthy -- but they are happily consumed anyway. Would people just stop reading the warning signals, just as smokers seem to ignore health warnings? Is the Stop GDA initiative an overreaction or is the food industry trying to lull us into the consumption of unhealthy food?
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.
KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia is the first country outside Europe to approve a pre-pandemic avian influenza vaccine called Prepandrix.
The Malaysia Drug Control Authority recently approved the new vaccine developed by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK).
GSK Pharmaceutical Malaysia managing director Francis Del Val said the company was looking forward to working with the Health Ministry in its efforts to prepare for a possible pandemic.
He said GSK's Prepandrix is a pre-pandemic drug to vaccinate populations prior to a H5N1 avian influenza pandemic.
Prepandrix is designed to provide cross-protection against a range of avian influenza caused by H5N1 strains.
A total of 408 people have been infected by bird flu since 2003, of which 255, mostly in Asia, died.
The H5N1 virus spreads from birds to humans via direct contact but experts fear it could mutate into a form transmissible among humans, with the potential to kill millions in a pandemic.
GSK clinical research and development and medical affairs public health physician and director Dr Teoh Yee Leong said Prepandrix was approved by all 27 European Union member states as well as Switzerland.
"The vaccine has proven in clinical trials that it is immunogenic against a number of H5N1 viral strains, including those circulating in Asia."
Teoh said there were two types of avian influenza vaccines: pandemic and pre-pandemic vaccines.
A pandemic vaccine carries the actual pandemic strain and is produced after it has been isolated.
Teoh said the problem with this vaccine was that it took four to six months to produce, leaving populations highly vulnerable during the initial period of a pandemic.
Pre-pandemic vaccines, she said, were produced before an influenza pandemic and are based on current circulating avian H5N1 influenza viruses.
is poised to become the European hub of an industry that could see regional farmers annually supplying thousands of tonnes of halal meat to Muslim communities throughout the world...
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