Introduction
The main goal of traceability is to help in keeping track of the food within the supply chain. It helps in supporting accurate recall or withdrawal of unsafe food, whenever it is needed. The more information you get to keep, the quicker and easier it will be to identify the affected food, mitigate the risks to consumers and also save money and time.
It is mandatory to have traceability information for business customers and suppliers. Retailers, along with the caterers, are not needed to keep the traceability information where they will be able to sell to the final consumer. But, when they supply the food businesses, all the traceability needs must get adhered to.
What do you mean by food traceability and why is it important?
Traceability is currently becoming a major part of the manufacturing procedure for companies in diversified industries. While some believe that it applies to products which are related to recalls, traceability is a significant part of every manufacturer’s procedures.
Depending on the significant cost, productivity advantages it offers and resources, it is not that hard to see why traceability is gaining importance. There you have some major importance down the line.
- Traceability is a quick, less costly and efficient product recall.
- With higher-level control, traceability will help with granular quality control.
- With the help of traceability systems implemented in full, firms can optimize the production process to enable efficiency and reduce any form of resource wastage.
What are the benefits of food traceability?
We at FICSI know the importance of food traceability these days and would like to share some of those points with you for better understanding.
- It is one way to increase the level of quality
- Traceability helps in improving the current product recalls
- Get your chances to improve inventory tracking with traceability
- Traceability is a way to improve food safety along with customer service to a whole new level
- You get the chance to respond to consumer demands with the help of traceability
Best Practices for Traceability in the Food Supply Chain
Food Traceability is always the cornerstone of the increasingly industrialized, complex and global food system. Traceability is widely used by manufacturers and producers to track down items for Food supply chain management issues and for clients. During any event of a recall, Food Traceability is highly critical to protect the health of consumers. Some of the best practices to follow are listed below.
- External Food Traceability: All the traceable items need to be identified uniquely and the information needs to be shared between all the affected distribution channel participants.
- Internal Food Traceability: Here, the procedures need to be maintained within a firm to link out identities of the raw materials to those of current finished goods. Whenever one material gets combined with others, the new product should have its own Unique Product Identifier.
Challenges in implementing Food Traceability
We, at FICSI, are here to share some information on challenges faced while implementing food traceability.
- We will help you to know how to convince the supply chain participants to help modify their well-polished version of working processes.
- There are some challenges involved while training thousands of workers on food traceability.
- You might feel challenges on ways to deal with a greater deal of conflicting interests.
- Challenges are related to unbalanced costs and benefits revolving around food traceability.
However, we at FICSI offer some food traceability course modules to help you understand more about this topic and to find the right result following the same.
