Food Traceability

The key aspect of creating a food traceability record is to store relevant data to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. Here’s a concise list of what you need to do to create a food traceability record:

1. Identify the ingredients and or/food products you will track which will help to determine the extent of your traceability system.
2. Identify the specific points in the supply or food production chain where the data needs to be recorded.
3. Determine how you will log the records. This could be in hard copy or digital form, like with the Stevens Traceability System.
4. Have an expiration date for your records and determine how long you intend to keep them. Regulatory requirements usually specify a minimum of 12 months after the product’s shelf life. With that said, there can also be additional legal requirements for other goods. For this reason, we advise you to keep your records for a minimum of 2 years.

One final point on this is under no circumstances should you duplicate and disregard the original records – they must be maintained as original whether that be on paper or in a digital format. By installing the Stevens Traceability System, you don’t need to worry about this. Providing enhanced traceability through capturing and storing data at every stage of production, your records are automatically stored digitally and can be accessed easily.

In the UK, retailers and caterers selling directly to the final customer are not legally required to keep traceability records for their sales.

With that said, for other food businesses, food manufacturing plants, all traceability requirements must be followed, including maintaining traceability records.

A traceability system in the food industry is an integrated system that tracks ingredients across processes, businesses and facilities. This can involve farm-to-fork traceability where ingredients are tracked from their point of origin, through processing within a factory or other food production facilities and then to product suppliers and finally finishing at it’s last destination in the customer’s hands.

Other food traceability systems involve tracking ingredients within a specific food production facility, such as a bakery, from the moment of goods-in to the resulting product, like a loaf of bread.

Traceability in food safety is the means of tracking both a food’s journey from one point to another and tracing the processes it undergoes in a food production facility. On a wider scale, it could be from the point of origin, like a farm, right through all the processes it undergoes to arrive at your plate in one form or another.

Food traceability is essential because it ensures where your food comes from and how it’s made. Knowing all the processes and regulations a particular food has to go through before it arrives in your facility helps ensure that it is safe to consume. In other words, traceability gives you transparency of a particular food’s journey so it can be deemed safe to eat.

Traceability in the food supply chain means tracing food from the point at which it’s on sale, all the way back to the point of origin, where it was in its most raw form.

Food traceability is important because you provide reassurance to both suppliers and customers of your products by preventing contamination. This, in turn, increases customer loyalty and encourages a positive reputation of your brand.

The system allows you to swiftly remove them once identified, minimising the risks to your customers, while simultaneously instilling trust and building a loyal customer base.

A key part of food traceability is keeping sufficient records, which helps you and your business in the long run. An electronic traceability system like the Stevens Traceability System provides enhanced traceability by capturing and storing data at every stage of production. This is helpful

because the more detailed and meticulous the records are, the easier it will be to successfully withdraw goods or carry out a product recall if required. What’s more, regulations like the BRC standard require an inspection of your traceability records as part of the assessment process.

Essentially, a traceability system ensures food quality, safety, and compliance with food standard regulations like the BRC standard.