Traceability -- A Literature Review

In light of recent food safety crises and international trade concerns associated with food or animal associated diseases, traceability has once again become important in the minds of public policymakers, business decision makers, consumers and special interest groups. This study reviews studies on traceability, government regulation and consumer behaviour, provide case studies of current traceability systems and a rough breakdown of various costs and benefits of traceability. This report aims to identify gaps that may currently exist in the literature on traceability in the domestic beef supply chain, as well as provide possible directions for future research into said issue. Three main conclusions can be drawn from this study. First, there is a lack of a common definition of traceability. Hence identifying similarities and differences across studies becomes difficult if not impossible. To this end, this study adopts CFIA’s definition of traceability. This definition has been adopted by numerous other agencies including the EU’s official definition of traceability however it may or may not be acceptable from the perspective of major Canadian beef and cattle trade partners. Second, the studies reviewed in this report address one or more of five key objectives; the impact of changing consumer behaviour on market participants, suppliers incentive to adopt or participate in traceability, impact of regulatory changes, supplier response to crisis and technical description of traceability systems. Drawing from the insights from the consumer studies, it seems as if consumers do not value traceability per se, traceability is a means for consumers to receive validation of another production or process attribute that they are interested in. Moreover, supply chain improvement, food safety control and accessing foreign market segments are strong incentives for primary producers and processors to participate in programs with traceability features. However the objectives addressed by the studies reviewed in this paper are not necessarily the objectives that are of most immediate relevance to decision makers about appropriate traceability standards to recommend, require, subsidize etc. In many cases the research objectives of previous work have been extremely narrow creating a body of literature that is incomplete in certain key areas. Third, case studies of existing traceability systems in Australia, the UK, Scotland, Brazil and Uruguay indicate that the pattern of development varies widely across sectors and regions. In summary, a traceability system by itself cannot provide value-added for all participants in the industry; it is merely a protocol for documenting and sharing information. Value is added to participants in the marketing chain through traceability in the form of reduced transactions costs in the case of a food safety incident and through the ability to shift liability. To ensure consumer benefit and have premiums returned to primary producers the type of information that consumers value is an important issue for future research. A successful program that peaks consumer interest and can enhance their eating experience can generate economic benefits to all sectors in the beef industry. International market access will increasingly require traceability in the marketing system in order to satisfy trade restrictions in the case of animal diseases and country of origin labelling, to name only a few examples. Designing appropriate traceability protocols industry wide is therefore becoming very important.traceability, institutions, Canada, consumer behaviour, producer behaviour, supply chain, Agricultural and Food Policy, Consumer/Household Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Health Economics and Policy, International Relations/Trade, Livestock Production/Industries, Marketing, Production Economics, D020, D100, D200, Q100,

Meat Slaughter and Processing Plants’ Traceability Levels Evidence From Iowa

In the United States (U.S.), there is no uniform traceability regulation across food sector. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) implemented one-step back and one-step forward traceability over the industries under its jurisdiction. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which oversees meat, poultry and egg production, requires some record keeping as part of food safety regulation. Particularly, a two-part-system has developed; live animal traceability and meat traceability with slaughter and processing plants in between. This paper studies the question of whether (and if so how) meat plants’ traceability levels vary with respect to the following factors; product specific (credence versus experience and search attributes, branded versus commodity meat, being exporter), organizational (spot market versus contracting), food safety related, and plant specific (a quality assurance system in place, number of sources, size, capital-labor ratio, etc.).traceability, food safety, quality assurances, animal ID, RFID,

The Case for UHF RFID application in the meat supply chain in the Irish context: a review perspective

As a result of recent food scares increasing pressure has been placed on food producing industries to incorporate a farm-to-fork traceability system. Conventional methods of traceability while reasonably successful are not without their disadvantages. These include potential damage and limited data capacity in the case of bar codes, unacceptable delays incurred through the use of DNA sampling and finally inapplicability of on biometric technologies due to permanent detachment post mortem. The aims of this paper is to outline the legislative requirements for traceability, technological aspects of current traceability systems, and the case for the widespread adoption of RFID in the farm-to-fork traceability of meat, all based on the Irish system. The arguments would be valid to any country or geographic region, with the existing differences taken into account. RFID technologies offer, among others, solutions to most important challenges to barcode technology, amenity to automation, possibility of value-added products, possibility for condition monitoring during storage and transport, potential to in house traceability under adverse processing environments, seamless integration with global supply chain, item-level traceability, and all these in near real-time

Improvement of Traceability Processes in the Farmed Fish Supply Chain

In the project "RFID from Farm to Fork" an implementation of RFID technologies are used along the food supply chain to be deployed in SMEs: from the farm to the consumer. As part of the project, two pilot deployments are being undertaken in the farmed fish business. The purpose of this paper is to show how the business process of the farmed fish supply chain can benefit from a novel system architecture that uses Radiofrequency Identification (RFID) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) to improve the processes of fish traceability. In order to show the technological evaluation, both a definition of each company´s business processes and how to upgrade them to the new technologies are presented. Keywords: Traceability, farmed fish, supply chain, aquaculture, RFID, WSN.NSFC – National Natural Science Foundation of China K. C. Wong Education Foundation (Hong Kong) Springer-Verla

RFID Data Loggers in Fish Supply Chain Traceability

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is an innovative and well-recognized technology that supports all kinds of traceability systems in many areas. It becomes very important in the food industry where the electronic systems are used to capture the data in the supply chain. Additionally, RFID data loggers with sensors are available to perform a cold chain optimization for perishable foods. This paper presents the temperature monitoring solution at the box level in the fish supply chain as part of the traceability system implemented with RFID technology. RFID data loggers are placed inside the box to measure the temperature of the product and on the box for measuring ambient temperature. The results show that the system is very helpful during the phases of storage and transportation of fish to provide the quality control. The sensor data is available immediately at the delivery to be checked on the mobile RFID reader and afterwards stored in the traceability systems database to be presented on a web to stakeholders and private consumers

Traceability requirements for information systems in the agro-food sector

Food safety and quality are keys to companies' business survival and great effort and resources are devoted to them. The food production chain, from the farms and feed mills to the finished products leaving the processing plants, is subject to independent examination and auditing either under the sector's own assurance schemes under official regulatory inspection and testing programmes with published results. For farmers and the agro-food industry, this means new market opportunities – and continual change. Food safety is an on-going challenge, demanding the best control systems and day-to-day vigilance on farms, in processing plants and throughout the distribution system. In order to enable consumers to make the right choice when buying their food and in order to build up markets for quality products, labelling has to provide all relevant information about the production process. Besides complete information about its ingredients, food labels should bear information about its place of origin and the way in which it was produced

On Improving Automation by Integrating RFID in the Traceability Management of the Agri-Food Sector

Traceability is a key factor for the agri-food sector. RFID technology, widely adopted for supply chain management, can be used effectively for the traceability management. In this paper, a framework for the evaluation of a traceability system for the agri-food industry is presented and the automation level in an RFID-based traceability system is analyzed and compared with respect to traditional ones. Internal and external traceability are both considered and formalized, in order to classify different environments, according to their automation level. Traceability systems used in a sample sector are experimentally analyzed, showing that by using RFID technology, agri-food enterprises increase their automation level and also their efficiency, in a sustainable wa

Application of Blockchain and Internet of Things to Ensure Tamper-Proof Data Availability for Food Safety

Food supply chain plays a vital role in human health and food prices. Food supply chain inefficiencies in terms of unfair competition and lack of regulations directly affect the quality of human life and increase food safety risks. This work merges Hyperledger Fabric, an enterprise-ready blockchain platform with existing conventional infrastructure, to trace a food package from farm to fork using an identity unique for each food package while keeping it uncomplicated. It keeps the records of business transactions that are secured and accessible to stakeholders according to the agreed set of policies and rules without involving any centralized authority. This paper focuses on exploring and building an uncomplicated, low-cost solution to quickly link the existing food industry at different geographical locations in a chain to track and trace the food in the market.Comment: Journal of Food Quality, 202

Rights management to enable a true Internet of Things

2016 IEEE Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI).In this paper, we differentiate between a true ‘Internet of things’ and its component parts. We argue that the determining aspect of the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) is the accessibility of ‘things’ on the global Internet, as opposed to a simple interconnection of networked ‘things’. We observe that most reported applications of the ‘Internet of Things’ would be more accurately described as ‘Intranets of Things’. In large part, this is because the owners and operators of AIDC (Automatic identification and data capture) systems and sensor networks that in the main make up the IoT have understandable concerns about the security of their assets and therefore will limit access to that which serves their own purposes. In the wider field of the Internet ‘in the large’, the open mining of the Web for information has become the mainstay of many genres of research, allowing the assembly of huge corpora, enabling analytical techniques that can reveal far more information than previous limited studies. It is argued that part of the expected dividend for the IoT is to enable use on a similar scale of sensor and AIDC data, and that the results will be availability of information fusion on a huge scale, which will allow significant new knowledge to be generated. We give an example of how in one project, the RFID from Farm to Fork traceability project, this prospect has been validated to an extent on the basis that data owners voluntarily made their data available on the Web for specific purposes. Extrapolating to a more general case, we suggest that there are two services that need to be provided in order for the generalized information mining that occurs on the Internet-at-large to occur in the Internet of Things. The first is a means of cataloguing available data, which is already being addressed by services such as HyperCAT. The second is an automatic rights management service (IoT-RM), which would manage the rights and permissions and allow data owners to determine in advance to whom their data should be released, for what purposes, subject to which restrictions (such as, for instance, anonymisation) and whether any remuneration should be involved. We make some concrete proposals about the form that such an IoT-RM should take