Traceability- Implementation

issue in warehouse or
distribution operation
-

G. Baskaran Manager QMS

1. Introduction:
In recent days, traceability has come under the spotlight in
the food industry after the recent recall of Instant noodle
manufactured in India. After the incident, many would
have googled to know what traceability is. Why does it
needed, what drives it?

table -1 enlisted examples of some of the expensive food

recalls in the world
Year

Contamination
/Food product

Estimated
Economic loss
( in $)

Region/
Country

2014

Lead in
Noodles

640 million

India

2013

Clostridium
botulinum / Whey
concentrate

Unknown

New
Zealand

Why is it need? In todays complex food supply chain and

consumer demand, we ended up in receiving food from
different part of the country or world to fulfil the customer
expectation, which is further processed or distributed or
supplied to various customer or store for their immediate
use or consumption. This very trend change in supply
chain forced or called the need of traceability to guarantee
the food safety and quality of food.

2009

Salmonella/
Peanuts Products

70 million

USA

2008

Salmonella/
Tomatoes

250 million

USA

2008

Mad cow diseases/

Meat

117 Million

USA

2. Drivers of traceability in Food

supply chain:

2007

Salmonella/ Peanut
butter

133 million

USA

What is traceability? Probably most of us might see the

system as Recall management tool. But, probably not.
Traceability is a proactive approach to developing a
system to track any food or feed through a specified stage
of production, processing or distribution. The system
enables food business operator to locate or identify any
particular batch of a product in the supply chain.

The system is generally demanded for various reasons

such as a) compliant to statutory regulation, b)
International standard and certification requirement c)
Implementation of marketing strategies and programs d)
the attestation of product origin, identity, and quality, and
e) most importantly it is important effective method to react
against the food safety outbreak.
The last point is becoming important due to the constant
increase in food crises due to food safety issues. There is
a study estimated the cost of food safety incidents for the
economy of United States is around $ 7billion / years. In

Instant

Table -1 some expensive Food recalls in world

Most of these losses represent lost markets, loss of
consumer demand, litigation and company closures.
Hence, its recommended to develop rigid food traceability
system to avoid unexpected lawsuit and economic losses

3. What FSSA -2006 says?

As per Food Safety Standard Act -2006, all Food business
operators engaged in manufacture or importation or
supply of food regulated under the act must have a
traceability system to initiate recall procedure in the event
of food safety outbreak.

Having said that, the compliance on subject cannot be

achieved independently by a company in food supply
chain, the efficiency of the tracking and tracing method
relies on the agreement among the group of companies
(Supplier, Transporter, Distribution Centre, and Retailer or
customer) involved in the supply chain, lack of
transparency in one point affects efficiency of traceability
in the complete network. For instance, a simple supply
chain flow captured in (fig-1).As you can see from the flow
chart that there is numerous communication (back & forth)
happens among various stakeholder .Its important that
every player in the supply chain has accurate information,
recording and storage of material data ( like batch, Mfg.
expiry and etc.,) for the successful implementation of
traceability. If fails at one point will cascade the effect to
the subsequent partner and breaks the chain of
traceability.

5. Trend and Perceptive

Regulations and Standards
With increasing concerns about food safety have placed
traceability as an essential component of Food Safety
Standard Act (2006), Certification process, Management
systems (Table -1).
Todays day it almost impractically to run food business
without the tool of a traceability system. In fact to have
the third party certification license or registration one
must showcase the adherence of traceability system.
Classification
Domestic
Regulation

Organization
FSSAI

International
Agreement

Codex
Alimentarius
Commission

International
standard

ISO 22000:2005

Private
Standard

GS-1 Global
traceability
standard

Global Food
safety
Initiative (
GFSI)
benchmarked
Standards

Includes British
Retail Consortium,
Global Standard,
International
Standard, HACCP,
Safe quality Food
and FSSC 22000

Supplier/ Manufacturer

Transportor

Warehouse

Distribution

Customer
Fig-1 Typical supply chain flows chart

4. Traceability in warehouse and

distribution centre:
Today's date distribution centre play a major role in food
distribution to connect the link of farm to fork. Needless
to say a successful implementation of traceability system
are equally relies on both external and internal partner.
Its obvious fact to know that accurate capturing,
recording, storage and distribution of the data (Batch /
Lot No) in a supply chain is an important aspect of having
an end to end traceability in distribution operation.
However, the same seems to be problematic due to
lapse on procedure or system or manual handling or
operational challenges to diligently capture, record, store
and distribute data for effective traceability in distribution
operation.

Definition of standard
As the ability to follow the
movement of a food through
specified stage of production,
processing, and distribution
As" the ability to follow the
movement of a food through
specified stage of production,
processing, and distribution.
Movement can relate to the
origin of the materials,
processing history, or
distribution of feed or food
forward or backwards
Establishes requirement for
food safety management
systems based on HACCP
principles as well as
traceability requirements
Supports implementation of
traceability systems across the
supply chain both locally and
globally including the
requirements of ISO 9001,
ISO 220005, HACCP, British
Retail Consortium Global
standard
GFSI guidance document
indicates in 6.1.17 that the
standard shall require the
supplier to develop and
maintain appropriate
procedures and systems to
ensure identification of any
outsourced product
,ingredient, or service,
completed records of batches
of in-process and record of
purchase and delivery
destination for all product
shipped

Table: 5 Traceability related Standards and

Regulations
Technologies application
With kind of complexity and globalisation, the need for
accurate traceability system can't be seen without the
hand of technology to have the end to end traceability in
food supply chain. This indulges an invention of various
technologies to compliant with statutory rules and
regulations.

Current Technologies
Bar Codes: Conventional methods, commonly used for
inventory control management and global logistics of
goods such as parcel shipping and delivery. Barcodes
represent data to uniquely identify a product. This can be
scanned by an electronic reader to identify and interpret
key data elements stored in the barcode. The data can
be used to trace the product forward and backwards
through the supply chain.

we compare with actual cost, and brand image impacted

during product recall without a traceability system in
place.
A well-known case of the potential damage of a recall on
a giant industry in a developing country occurred with
Instant noodles in India. Following report of heavy lead
content in that instant noodles, and in the absence of
traceability capabilities, the FSSAI issued a ban on the
entire variety of instant noodles. Resulted from a recall of
almost 400million packets from across the country. The
devastating effects affect brand image, consumer
confidence, and net loss of 640 million (in Rs)

Fig-2 Barcoding Tomato

It requires a printing component to print bar codes on
labels or products and a scanning technology to read
barcode information which actually cost less than $100.
Storage of data elements on a barcode depends on the
type of barcode technology used. The GTIN uses a 14
digit barcode with information about companies, product,
and product attributes worldwide, which can be read
upstream and downstream through a supply chain.
RFID (Radio Frequency Identification): Offer promising
capabilities for traceability in the fast growing food supply
chain and are seen as an alternative and effective to
older barcode systems. It makes use of radio frequency
communications to exchange data between a portable
memory device or smart label and a host computer.
RFID tag can be encoded with large amounts of variable
information that can be gathered by a RFID reader.
Unlike bar codes, RFID data can be accessed without
the visibility of tag itself and multiple RFID smart labels
can be read at the same time

Fig-4 - Instant Noodle Profit loss after the recall

7. Conclusion and Remarks:

Increasing globalisation ( Shown infig-5) and customer
demand in food industry, we might hard to believe that
the food we eat our meal on day to day basis might
originate, manufactured and supplied from the different
part of the country or world. Do you believe this? But it is
true.
In order to compete and be adaptive to the change of
complexity, one must have robust food traceability
system (with technology) in their end to end operations.
Without this, its hard pressed to find out the flow of food
material (Upstream and Downstream) when a need
arises to recall. There is numerous way to track product
through supply chains range from paper-based records
to ICT based technology

Fig-3 RFID scanning

6. Estimation of traceability
system implements costs
The cost associated with traceability system into place
are always seen as barrier among supply chain partners
It was estimated through various study that actual cost
incurred to implement traceability is much cheaper when

6. http://www.foodsafetymagazine.com/magazinearchive1/augustseptember-2004/new-technologies-forfood-traceability-package-and-product-markers/
7. http://www.foodsafetymagazine.com/magazinearchive1/december-2005january-2006/innovations-intraceability-systems-and-product-id-tools/
8. http://www.sdcexec.com/article/11408168/foodtraceability-technology-is-one-approach-to-bridging-thegap-between-safety-and-compliance

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Fig- 5 Source: USDA Peanut product distribution

Though, the Paper-based system is still used in some of
the industry. 100% traceability in food supply chain might
be difficult without the hand of technology (Barcode,
RFID and others). Attribute of the technologies not only
reside with traceability alone, in fact, we can effectively
monitor all the event in supply chain like inventory
management, FEFO stock rotation, optimisation, and
etc.,
Especially, in food distribution and supply chain the
chance of human error is considerably high (due to the
fact of optimization, turnaround time, and volume of
transaction) at the time of data capturing and storage,
which why its recommended include the technology in
their existing traceability system at all stage of food
supply chain

8. Reference:
1. Traceability issue in Food supply chain Management:
A review by Fabrizio Dabbne, Paolo Gay, Cristina Tortia
2. Basic Requirement of Material Traceability in
warehouse by Krisztina Krivacs, Tamas Hartvanyi, and
Csaba Tapler,
3. ICT in Agriculture section 3 Accessing Markets and
Value Chains, Module 12- Global Markets, Global
challenges: Improving food safety and Traceability while
empowering smallholders through ICT.
4.http://indianexpress.com/article/business/businessothers/the-maggi-effect-nestle-posts-first-loss-in-17years/
5. http://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2015/06/19/the-mindboggling-scale-of-nestles-maggi-noodle-recall-thenumbers/