Traceability. Sometimes referred to as track and trace.
Several years ago, nobody really cared to ask where groceries came from – except of course where some prejudice or preference exists with products from particular geographical regions. Other than that, as long as the visuals were appealing to the consumer or agent, they would just pick what they find on the shelf, pay for it and take it home.
But that has since been overtaken by time, and this is for two key reasons.
The first of course, in the eyes of the grower, is the hunger for feedback in the business scene today. Many commercial growers today will want to know what their output is like, and so calculate return on investment that is traceable to farm subdivisions/blocks. Exporters also implement traceability to track the performance of their growers, in terms of how their raw material packs or performs.
But the more important reasoning behind track and trace is an industrial need to be able to tie the safety of food to its source. Following many issues to do with chemical residues being found in food, especially in the European market, need arose to seek both root causes of such issues, as well as come up with corrective actions that would be effective because they are implemented at the specific source of the product that was found to have safety concerns.
It has therefore become a practise for many serious growers and exporters in the market to have not only a trace code visible on the least pack size of the products they supply, but also to have such codes only as a visible part of a very elaborate traceability process, which in many cases is dictated in such a dealer’s Food Safety manual.
Good growers also go a step further to repeatedly train and sensitize their teams at their different levels of production on traceability – why it is important, as well as providing simple, clear ways to ensure that track is never lost for any product unit that gets to the market.
