EU System for Tracking and Tracing Flow and Origin of Food as a Guarantee to Ensure Consumer Safety

One of the European Union’s (EU) priorities is to ensure safety of its consumers. For that purpose, the Community has introduced a system for tracking and tracing flow of food products. It ensures the possibility of food identification on all stages of production, processing and distribution. This system enables quick communication with all partners within the system, as well as within international supply chains, which causes consumers to receive fully safe range of products made of EU pork and beef.

Ensuring high quality of pork, beef and their products manufactured in the European Union territory is possible, thanks to maintaining proper hygiene of food and quality control involving classification and examination of carcasses, as well as through introduction of product recall mechanisms. Implementation of the above-mentioned assumptions requires registration and data gathering about products by each individual EU company in the food chain. For that purpose, certification standards, monitoring procedures on different stages of production, product care procedures, tracking system and proper labelling connected with it are used in the EU territory.

Traceability

Stress is placed upon the full traceability of pork, beef and their products in the countries of the Community (Reg. 931/2011/EC).[1] Starting from a farmer (breeder) to end up with a consumer, all information about the breeding of an animal and post-slaughter meat processing is disclosed. According to the assumptions of the traceability system, each EU farmer (producer) is given an individual identification number. It enables quick identification of a producer. Unique identification numbers are also given to swine and cattle. For that purpose, ear tags – which identify individual animals, as well as computer databases and animal passports, are used. Cattle and swine identification and registration system also involves animal registers, which are kept on every farm in the EU. Only keeping of detailed documentation can guarantee a link between individual processing stages within the supply chain. It allows tracking of the animal from its last owner back to its place of birth.

In the EU territory, there are various means of identification of live swine and cattle. Apart from on-paper documents (passports, registers), they also involve electronic documentation, tattoos (on an ear, a shoulder or a mouth), tags (on an ear or around a tail – made of plastic or metal, ordinary or RFID[2] devices), transponders (which hang down on neck chains in the form of under-skin chips or located in the muscles of mastication), and biometric (DNA prints, scanning and imaging of retina).

Tracking and tracing

Traceability of pork, beef and their products in the countries of the Community is realised in two directions: ‘one-step-forward’ or ‘one-step-backward’ in the production chain. It means that every producer must be able to point all of its suppliers and likewise to list all entities for whom that producer had been a supplier. On the basis of such information, the system is able to track the product down the stream of the food chain, from the beginning till the end. ‘Tracking’ enables identification at each point of the supply chain. On the other hand, ‘tracing’ allows to identify the origin of the raw material by going up the food production chain. It enables reconstruction of the delivery history and to find the source of quality problems.

The EU integrated quality systems enable to analyse the whole history of the production process of pork, beef and their products. The main benefits of traceability are safety and the high quality of EU pork, beef and their products. Tasks carried out by numerous EU food control and safety systems guarantee that food that does not meet the requirements do not reach the market. Therefore, in times of current high market competition, high production standards used in the EU countries allow to strengthen its position on the global market.