Traceability helps to keep track of the movement of food products through all stages in the supply chain. This includes production, process and distribution of food and other ingredients. The most important reason is to ensure unsafe food which is unfit for human consumption is not placed on the market, and in case there is a food safety incident, this type of product can be removed immediately without causing too much harm and reduce the occurrence of foodborne illnesses.
Other than that, nowadays, consumers are increasingly interested in where their food comes from for other reasons than safety alone. Many consumers want to know where their food comes from and whether it was responsibly and ethically sourced. It is becoming an important part of trust building between the consumers and food brands. High level of traceability also benefits the company as it is the best way to keep track and have control of what is happening with their products in their supply chain at every point.
For the past decade, the food industry has been working on tracing food courses from the field or sea all the way to its consumer. By utilizing technology and implementing IT systems and platforms, food companies can become transparent, safe, efficient, and sustainable.
In 2010, Ecotrust launched an online tracing platform to help consumers to trace their seafood back to the harvester. This platform quickly expanded to various industries within seafood. However, most data were trapped in paper records and the fish processing plants became a data bottleneck. As a solution to this problem, a Seafood Traceability Software, was developed enabling data to be collected in real time in the factory floors using mobile devices. Data collection is automated by integrating industrial hardware and sensors to save time and reduce errors. New entries of data are updated in real time automatically on dashboards where they can be monitored live, and the assembling of reports and calculations are also automated to save time with the use of SQL queries.
Digitizing data has never been easier. It eliminates paperwork, and with simplifying and automating data collection, time is saved also with reporting. A growing number of companies are also committing to comply with new traceability standards and integrate with blockchain technology.
Sources:
https://www.fda.gov/food/new-era-smarter-food-safety/tracking-and-tracing-food
https://www.bcg.com/publications/2021/food-traceability
https://www.startus-insights.com/innovators-guide/top-10-food-technology-trends-innovations-in-2021/
https://www.cropin.com/blogs/whats-on-my-plate-the-importance-of-food-traceability/
This such an interesting topic indeed! Traceability of our food consumption and its supply chain are definitely becoming very essential for consumers. However, what do you think the future of this software looks like? Is it gaining a lot of attention from the consumers? Also, I imagine that it is a lot of work to collect these data of the food’s supply chain as there are many stakeholders to consider. Exactly how many companies are participating in providing all the related supply chain data for consumers to access? It would be really interesting to know some figures to understand the impact that the platform and the software are bringing to the current industry. Also, would be great to know some future prediction on how this platform and software are going to become even more impactful in the upcoming years. Potentially, this platform can later be expanded to include the supply chain tracing of all kind of foods, so not only seafood. It would be an interesting platform to look forward to, especially if it offers even larger variety of foods to trace. Great writing indeed! ☺️👍
Great article. I do agree that traceability of products will be an important trend in recent digital transformation strategies, especially with the development of blockchain that will serve as a great tool for that. Although I think that nowadays supply chains of various produtcs are so complex it won’t be an easy task to do. To have full traceability of products various supply parties would need to implement such soulutions that would also be easily integrateable with solutions of other parties.