End-to-end traceability addresses market demand for food and beverage insights
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According to Europol’s latest Opson IX report on food fraud activity, 12,000 illicit food products were seized with approximately $40 million in retail value. It reports that 19 organised crime groups were disrupted, and 27,579 inspections were conducted. About two million litres of fake or sub-standard drinks and 2,000 tons of fraudulent fruit and vegetables were seized.
Aside from food fraud, there is an emerging trend of consumers demanding access to much more data surrounding the sources of raw materials that make up their foods and whether those materials are produced sustainably.
These developments drive requirements for greater product insights all along the food and beverage supply chain. This is referred to as end-to-end traceability and transparency, a holistic supply chain vision that captures and analyses data from different sources and stakeholders.
It allows companies to track products as they move along the supply chain, eg, tracing suppliers and locations and providing complete transparency and visibility into all information related to a product’s origin, ingredients, allergens, and physical characteristics.
From the consumer standpoint, product origin, ethical trading, and animal welfare are integral to purchasing decisions. These factors are making responsible sourcing increasingly important. At the corporate level, a growing number of indexes and standards convey this, such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, which allows investors to link sustainability to valuation.
The final factor driving increased supply chain visibility is regulations that are becoming more complex and stricter, such as the FDA’s Food Safety 2.0, individual country import regulations, and an in-development product recall standard for product recall by GS1 (a global standard for encoding information produced by the F&B industry such as product codes, ingredients, additives, consumer information, composition, allergens, and more).
Developing a digital passport
Overcoming the challenges of end-to-end traceability requires a solution to build an electronic passport of the product from farm to fork.
- The upstream process would collect all the ingredient information, relevant certificates, and map suppliers to the lowest level of hierarchy like individual farmers.
- For midstream, at the processing plant, it would record the entire production process, including processing, cleaning, and packaging.
- The cycle would follow the product along the supply chain from warehouses to distributors, to retailers to the end customer downstream. To deliver a complete end-to-end traceability model with an electronic passport, data is required from all along the supply chain.
Upstream at the source of the food stock, companies need an origin module to capture data on the raw materials and link each product with the ingredient’s information. This will include data sources such as complete supplier mapping to the lowest level, quality results, certificates, and results from sample tests.
When capturing this upstream raw material information, companies also need to capture real-time data. How much milk is there in each of the dairy collection centres? What is the temperature? What are the pH values? How is it maintained? All this data must be collected remotely. It is the same for a livestock or cereal farm, although the collection parameters may differ with data sources such as soil condition, animal feed, and fertiliser use. This information should be handled by a system that can monitor, maintain, and improve production output.
Companies need to know which material from which lot has been used for every production order. Then, when the product comes into the plant, they need to ensure that they have all the information related to how the raw materials are transformed into a finished product. This includes full traceability and materials genealogy.
It is all about the data
Finally, when it goes to the consumer, they need all the data about the product in a digital format. Nearly two-thirds of grocery shoppers would switch to brands that disclose more than just ingredient and nutritional information. For that, the producer must combine all the information related to the product in a digital format at one location. The data must be transferred in a common format defined by standards from supply chain regulators to any retailer selling the product.
If a chocolate bar is produced by a confectionery manufacturer and sold to two different supermarket chains, both retailers need to get the same information about the product. Using software like the product information management (PIM) solution, centralises all end-product data and makes it available to stakeholders internally and externally, from e-commerce platforms to stores.
PIM system data is constantly updated to comply with GS1. PIM provides a framework for ensuring that the hand-off from one supplier to the next is traceable and trackable as it moves through the supply chain. It also assures that product data can be standardised, centralised, and distributed with complete security.
