Food traceability, labelling and processing quality controls need to be streamlined

probe

The current dioxin contamination of pork fiasco demonstrates yet again the poor design of the food safety control /traceability and labelling systems used in the EU and member states. They really need a systematic tracking system that can be used at any point from the farm/producer to the consumers’ fridge. A system that would minimise the waste of food, and the pollution caused destroying unnecessary quantities of food because accountability has gone out of control.

It is basically an information management issue, to enable quick reaction when events present themselves. We are used to having all consumer products marked with a GS1 (aka EAN) barcode for inventory control and price look-up at the checkout. When it comes to food, surely there should be a second (far more important than the “price barcode”) Europe-wide standardised quality control monitoring barcode on each box and item label to enable easy identification of recalled product or food that has past its best before date.

A simple system that would allow retail or warehouse staff to zap through boxes in a warehouse/cold store/stock room or retail display and quickly identify batches of food items that have been withdrawn for safety reasons or that have past a specified date. The same barcode could be used by householders to provide batch safety assurance to them as the end consumer of the product.

As it stands, the concept of food traceability “from farm to fork” in is nothing more than a marketing con trick, invented by marketing wasters and bureaucrats. If traceability was functioning properly, the authorities would not now be faced with the issue of destroying large quantities of the entire pipeline of pork products produced in IRL since September. Or letting it go rotten in warehouses while they figure out which is safe, and which is not.

At one level there will be some batches of product that can be proven to have not come next or near the source of contamination. At another level, there will be some plants that have processed product from the affected farmers, as well as “clean” product from other farmers. If traceability is working properly in these plants, they will have batches of product that they can prove with documentation contain no “tainted” meat (ie product from animals supplied by farms that didn’t use the feed in question). Should this product not be also released for sale? Any plant that doesn’t manage its traceability system to the required level of resolution should not be eligible for any compensation in the event of government recalls.

The current EU food labelling regulations are appallingly designed, inconsistent and stupid in many instances. They do not tell a complete story to the consumer. For example I have some Irish smoked salmon in my fridge. The ingredients says that it is 97% salmon and 3% salt. The EU country code on the packaging is FR (ie France) – (I bought it in Carrefour, and it was packed at EMB code 29105D – which is the French food plant authorization number) – so I can find out where it was processed and packed. The product is obviously Irish and not French as far as substance is concerned. I don’t really care if the salt used came from the Camargue, or elsewhere. While there are some packaged foods that are mixtures of ingredients from many countries, where someone is buying a meat product that makes up 90%+ of the product in the package, the country of origin of the meat (ie where the animal or bird was born and raised) should be incorporated in the statutory label code.

A comprehensive label might include:
Born in XX
Raised in XX
Slaughtered in XX
Packed in XX

Where XX is the ISO 3166-2 country code (the same as is used in internet URLs) – presented in a matrix of boxes preferably with universally understood symbols to represent “born in” etc.

If the product comprises meat from animals born in two or more countries, all country codes should be listed or alternatively the producer could perhaps opt to put a “-“ in the born in field. “Fussy consumers” would have the option of not buying the stuff, given that the manufacturer can’t be bothered to provide country origin information, or feels the source if disclosed would lead to reduced sales of his junk.

This full disclosure of origin and processing would prevent third world chickens produced to less than EU standards from being misleadingly foisted on EU consumers by getting packed in an EU state with a respectable food reputation.

At the moment a variety of country codes are used. Belgium uses the UN code “B” or the ISO 3166-2 code “BE”. Britain generally uses “UK” which has no basis in law – the UN and ISO country codes for the United Kingdom are “GB”. Variations in codes are confusing for consumers, particularly across languages, GB works in all European languages, whereas UK only works in English – and is not really the name of the country, any more than “united republic” could be said to be a name for Ireland.

In the case of Ireland, I’ve seen Irish packed food with “IRL”, “IRE” “Ireland” and “IE” as country codes on the packing plant identity oval logo, probably arising from a mix of incompetence and multiple, inconsistent EU directives from Brussels.

The same requirements should be imposed on vendors of prepared foods (eg restaurants and junk food stores selling *.burgers, fried “chicken” and other mechanically recovered meat (MRM) rubbish) by requiring them to disclose the origin of meat and fish on their menus.

While the born in, raised in, slaughtered in information should be presented for the information of the consumer, the packaging plant data should be used as the basis of control and traceability.

Food processing plant batch numbering should be standardised, perhaps based on the week number. E.g. 09.03-00001 would be the first batch produced in the third week of 2009. Combining the standardised plant number and batch number would provide an easy to track identity to each batch – eg IE-CW-999-09.03-00001 would be something packed in Ireland, in Co. Carlow, by plant number 999, produced in the third week of 2009, batch number 1. These data, perhaps combined with the best before date could be incorporated into a single barcode, making it easy for retail staff to scan barcodes for batches of merchandise that either has been withdrawn from the supply chain or had past its best by date. As a further refinement these data could be incorporated on the invoice (many of which are EDI electronic documents), so that the retailer’s inventory control computer could determine which stores had food that should be withdrawn from sale. Batch details of unsafe food could be made available in downloadable files and/or XML format on an EU website for retailers and other interested parties, for direct loading into handheld barcode merchandise checkers.

A similar barcode based tracing system could be used upstream in the food industry to cover batch control over packages of feed and other inputs. By linking the feed and other inputs to identified units of output at each stage, one could be ensured of a bullet-proof traceability system with minimum risk of waste in the event of a problem.

This would provide an industry-wide standardised information and communications infrastructure for the management of food safety, running over the internet, scalable on a global basis if required.

We are paying the highest prices in the world for food in Europe, and consumers deserve a control system that works in an ethical and efficient manner , a system that is focused, nips problems in the bud before they get out of control, and minimises the need for mass destruction of otherwise edible food because the system is untrustworthy or has gaps in the audit trail.

There is no reason why this food industry seamless integration is not continued to the domestic fridge in the home. The fridge could be equipped with a barcode reader connected to a home PC and the internet – either built into a new fridge, or as a clamp on device in existing devices.

When you take an item out of your shopping bag, you scan it as you put it in the fridge. The system records the barcodes, including the best before date. You might have the option of setting your PC to notify you of food in the fridge that is going to hit its best before date tomorrow – so it can be consumed in a timely manner rather than forgotten and later have to be thrown out. The program running on your PC would effectively know what is in your fridge, and could also alert you in the event of a product recall, or a suspicion of a problem (don’t consume this – leave it in the fridge pending further clarification). The item could be scanned a second time when removed from the fridge if you wanted to record it on a shopping list for replacement.

In the event of a recall, disposal information could be provided to the consumer, if the food supplier decided to let the consumer make their own disposal arrangements rather than having to take it back to the place of purchase - creating needless handling expenses for the supply chain. The consumer could be refunded directly by crediting their debit card account, or issued with a voucher (in the same way as one can print out airline boarding passes at home). Disposal information could include instructions on whether it was safe to compost or if special precautions were required.

The existing EAN/GS1 barcode infrastructure organisations could possibly be leveraged to deliver a food quality control barcode infrastructure:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GS1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GS1_country_codes

(I notice Ireland has only 1 block of GS1 numbering space – 539, similar sized countries such as Denmark, Finland, Norway, New Zealand each have 10 blocks. (536 to 538 are still unallocated, and should surely be grabbed poste haste by www.gs1.ie or IRL risks running out of contiguous numbering space at a point in the future)!

http://www.gs1.org/

As an aside, I notice that The Dutch Product Board for Animal Feed (Productschap Diervoeder) produced a useful report on drying processes for animal feed in 2004 - which goes into fuel safety issues for heating feed. It is basically the same story as with any other burning / incineration process. Dioxins can only be produced by burning chlorine and carbons at low temperatures (<800 C) . Clearly you can’t process animal feed at 800C, so you have to make sure that there is no chlorine in the fuel used to process food. It is difficult to ensure that recycled oil does not contain chlorine, so recycled oil should logically be banned from anything to do with the food chain. There are other nasties that fuel for animal feed should not contain above a given level - eg sulphur.

http://www.pdv.nl/lmbinaries/kwaliteitsreeks_nr._101_study_into_drying_processes_for_animal_feed_materials_and_haccp.pdf

Macha

I would argue that there's something rotten in the highly industrialized food system that no amount of labelling can cure.

Also, you say we pay the highest prices of food in the world but on what basis is that comparison made? Also, most of our food is very heavily subsidised through CAP and there are almost zero market signals these days.

P. Breathnach

A lot of pork is already traceable, and much of that withdrawn from sale could be shown to be unaffected by the contaminated feedstuff. I think there may have been an important failure in that area. The safe product should have been identified, guaranteed clear, put back on sale almost immediately.

I don't know if full traceability is practicable for mass-produced processed products like sausages. Where they are produced on an artisinal scale, some traceability seems manageable.

Some of your other ideas seem interesting, but I don't think we are ready for them yet. I will not yield to my fridge telling me that I have to eat that yoghurt before midnight.

probe

taconnol wrote: »

I would argue that there's something rotten in the highly industrialized food system that no amount of labelling can cure.

Also, you say we pay the highest prices of food in the world but on what basis is that comparison made? Also, most of our food is very heavily subsidised through CAP and there are almost zero market signals these days.

I agree that we are suffering from a highly industrialized food system, the rotten side of globalisation. I try and buy my food locally wherever I am, and would prefer to have the time and space to grow it myself, but I don't.

As far as food prices are concerned I travel a fair bit, and make a point of looking at the quality and price of food on sale locally, and regularly buy food in several continental European countries and in Ireland, and my food basket in Ireland invariably costs more. With the very odd exception. Cauliflower in IRL is usually cheaper than Chou-fleur en France. Having said that, Irish cauliflower are usually smaller, so if one had a big family to feed, the French product is probably as cheap. As far as restaurant food prices are concerned, Ireland is very much higher than anywhere else in Europe, comparing like for like in terms of quality, (aside from the Netherlands where restaurant food in my opinion is appalling for the most part).

Labelling can't cure the problem of globalised/industrialized food production. However one could argue that a high resolution labelling system backed up with online real-time traceability data is far more essential in an industrialized food marketplace, compared with a local food shop where you know the grocer and he knows the farmer who grew your food. You have good interactivity between consumer and producer if you are living in a local grocer/local producer environment. While my "i-label" solution can't put flavour and vitamins and all the goodness into industrialized food, it can at least provide some element of timely interactivity between producer and consumer and help reduce waste.

Furthermore it could be developed over time to create an feedback loop between consumer and producer which might help improve overall quality. There is no reason why the barcode labelling system I have suggested isn't economically usable by the smallest producer - all they need is a PC, printer, labels, and the label creation software which could easily be made available on an open source basis. Of course they would need a packaging plant ID number, which I assume Brussels bureaucracy requires anyway. If they don't need this ID number, they don't need to involve themselves with the labelling system.

I don't object to paying a high price for food, and am certainly not after "cheap food". But I do expect consistent, reliable quality. Ireland is the most obsessed country when it comes to dioxins that I know of, bar none, on this planet. The country is overflowing with landfill, leading to all sorts of nasties seeping into the water table due to the absence of physical recycling / incineration to convert waste material into energy. Properly managed incineration does not expose the environment to dioxins. It beggars belief / C'est incroyable! that the Irish food safety "system" allows animal feed to be fuelled up with dioxins in a recycling yard. The only way for dioxins to get into the human body is through food!!!

probe

P. Breathnach wrote: »

I don't know if full traceability is practicable for mass-produced processed products like sausages. Where they are produced on an artisinal scale, some traceability seems manageable.

Anyone who eats sausages and similar is signing a blank cheque!

Some of your other ideas seem interesting, but I don't think we are ready for them yet. I will not yield to my fridge telling me that I have to eat that yoghurt before midnight.

You could configure the software to keep silent about food getting close to best before dates. Or instruct it to warn you only if it has past its best before date by a month! Or whatever you like. I'm not into forcing things on people. I'm just interested in making the infrastructure available for people who wish to use it.