Food traceability: one ingredient in a safe and efficient food supply: food traceability is in the news: recent news stories have focused on tracking cattle from birth to finished product to control the risk of Mad Cow, on tracking food shipments to reduce the risk of tampering, and on traceability systems to detail country of origin, animal welfare and genetic composition

Prepared Foods, Jan, 2005 by Elise Golan, Barry Krissoff, Fred Kuchler

Many buyers, including many restaurants and some grocery stores, now require their suppliers to establish traceability systems and to verify, often through third-party certification, that such systems work. The growth of third-party standards and certifying agencies is helping push the whole food industry--not just those firms that employ third-party auditors--toward documented, verifiable traceability systems.

* Traceability to market and differentiate foods. The U.S. food industry is a powerhouse producer of homogeneous bulk commodities such as wheat, corn, soybeans and meats. Increasingly, the industry is tailoring goods and services to the tastes and preferences of various groups of consumers. Consumers easily spot some of these new attributes--green ketchup is hard to miss. However. other innovations involve credence attributes, characteristics that consumers cannot discern even after consuming the product. Consumers cannot, for example, taste or otherwise distinguish between conventional corn oil and oil made from genetically engineered (GE) corn.

Credence attributes can describe content or process characteristics of the product. Content attributes affect the physical properties of a product, although they can be difficult for consumers to perceive. For example, consumers are unable to determine the amount of isoflavones in a glass of soymilk or the amount of calcium in a glass of enriched orange juice by drinking these beverages.

Process attributes do not affect final product content but refer to characteristics of the production process.

Process attributes include country of origin, free-range, dolphin-safe, shade-grown, earth-friendly and fair-trade. In general, neither consumers nor specialized testing equipment can detect process attributes.

Traceability is an indispensable part of any market for process credence attributes--or content attributes that are difficult or costly to measure. The only way to verify the existence of these attributes is through recordkeeping that establishes their creation and preservation. For example, tuna caught with dolphin-safe nets can only be distinguished from tuna caught using other methods through a recordkeeping system that ties the dolphin-safe tuna to an observer on the boat from which the tuna was caught. Without traceability as evidence of value, no viable market could exist for dolphin-sale tuna, fair-trade coffee, non-biotech corn oil, or any other process credence attribute.

Options to Enhance Traceability

In cases where markets do not supply enough traceability for product differentiation, individual firms and industry groups have developed systems for policing and advertising the veracity of credence claims. Third-party safety/quality auditors are at the heart of these efforts. These auditors provide consumers with verification that traceability systems exist to substantiate credence claims. For example, auditors from Food Alliance (Portland, Ore.), a non-profit organization, certify foods grown with a specific set of sustainable agricultural practices.