Defining your fresh produce traceability requirements
Fresh Produce Traceability is much more than applying a label to the packed fruit or vegetable. FarmSoft delivers strict fresh produce traceability guidelines for supply chain end to end food safety & transparency. Using the fresh produce blockchain from CHAIN-TRACE.com, farmsoft also offers fresh produce blockchain access at a very low cost.
Ensuring that the fresh produce traceability chain has no gaps in it is important to reduce the risk exposure of your business. If there is a breach in the traceability chain, then the whole traceability enforcement system has failed and becomes a pointless expense. FarmSoft ensures 100% accuracy of traceability throughout the entire life-cycle of fresh produce, from pre-planting, to post sales traceability guideline adherence. FarmSoft ensures your business is not unnecessarily exposed, while minimizing compliance costs. Produce traceability makes it possible to track produce from its point of origin to a retail location where it is purchased by consumers.
Produce traceability is an important link in protecting public health since it allows health agencies to more quickly and accurately identify the source of contaminated fruit or vegetables believed to be the cause of an outbreak of foodborne illness, remove them from the marketplace, and communicate to the supply chain.
Since many fruits and vegetables are eaten raw, the produce industry‚ from farmer to retailer, works diligently to protect these foods from contamination. Despite their best efforts, foreign matter can occasionally contaminate produce in the field or orchard, in packing or processing, in transit or storage.
Because traceability systems can provide information on the source, location, movement and storage conditions of produce, they also allow growers, packers, processors and distributors to identify factors affecting quality and delivery.
FarmSoft Packhouse Management software provides a strong platform for accurate recording of fresh produce traceability records, via a variety of easy and logical methods. Risk exposure to the pack shed is greatly reduced by having resolution traceability guideline compliance, which in turn reduces financial exposure to the packhouse should a recall become necessary. Accurate fresh produce traceability reduces the quantity of fruit/vegetables in a recall, and therefore reduces the businesses financial exposure. High traceability helps to open new markets for fresh produce, and improves customer confidence in product quality.
Best practice standards for fresh produce traceability such as BRC, GlobalGAP, ISO, HACCP, CanGAP, EuroGAP, (and many more) are supported by FarmSoft, making compliance and audits easy and less expensive.
Fresh produce traceability for fruit & vegetables
fresh produce traceability for fruit & vegetables
The FarmSoft fresh produce traceability system constitutes thousands of processes & guidelines that are integrated throughout the entire system, guiding users to record correct fresh produce traceability details at the correct time.
FarmSoft Packhouse Management’s “Traceability” module isn’t a stand alone module. Traceability is built into the core of FarmSoft, in every process, action, and document. FarmSoft minimizes the data capture and entry costs associated with fresh produce traceability using various innovative techniques.
Download the FarmSoft Packhouse Software brochure or watch the fruit packing video.
Pack sheds and pack-houses are experiencing new levels of regulatory control in the pack shed and packhouse processes for fruit and vegetables. Contemporary industrialized fruit and vegetable packing has become increasingly regulated over the past decade. There are now literally hundreds of thousands of regulations world wide that relate to the Traceability and Food Safety of the production of fruit and vegetables for human consumption. The ability of modern supply chains for fresh produce to provide traceability is becoming the norm. At present the systems need to provide relatively straightforward capability to trace back from the market to the source of supply, or trace forward by associating production information with the product. There are, however, significant opportunities to improve supply chain performance through better traceability as well. Two examples are introduced to highlight this potential, one that provides feedback to growers on measured quality and the other feedback to the market on predicted quality. These applications for information sharing require a detailed level of traceability. At this level of detail it is not possible to have an absolute confidence in individual fruit traceability due to mixing that occurs at certain points in the supply chain. The level of traceability is, however, adequate to facilitate improved information systems for enhanced supply chain performance.
Recalls, audits, mock audits
A fresh produce traceability system must allow easy, and rapid recalls of fresh produce, packaging materials, the following list is the minimum recall and instant audit ability that should be achieved (this data should be available to the user within 10 seconds or less to demonstrate it is unadulterated):
Fresh Produce Traceability
Fresh produce traceability is a business process that enables trading partners to follow products as they move from field through to retail store or food service operator. Each Traceability Partner must be able to identify the direct source (supplier) and direct recipient (customer) of product.The first priority of traceability is to protect the consumer through faster and more precise identification of implicated product. This is critical if the product must be withdrawn from the supply chain.This document serves as a best practice guide to implementing traceability in the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable (Produce) Industry. The best practices recommended are based on global standards for supply chain management and product identification. These standards were developed by industry to optimize business practices across supply chains world-wide.
What is the scope of this fresh produce traceability guideline?
■ Applies to fresh fruit and vegetables for human consumption.
■ Traceability practices from grower to retail store or food service operator (i.e. external traceability).
■ Applies to all levels of product and shipping containers, including pallets, cases and consumer items.
This is a practical guide that is intended for those responsible for implementing traceability in their company’s operations and supply chain. The document provides a guide for fresh produce growers, packers, exporters/importers, and distributors as well as their customers and suppliers. Individual organisations may perform any combinations of these roles.
Traceability Definitions
■ Traceability is the ability to trace the history, application or location of that which is under consideration. [ISO 9001: 2000]
■ External Traceability is the business processes that occur between trading partners and the information/data exchanged to execute traceability.
■ Internal Traceability is the proprietary data and business processes a company uses within its own span of operations to execute traceability.1.4.2.
Traceability Standards are the common language of business and provide the framework required to support the traceability (business) process. This industry best practice implementation guideline is based on the GS1 Global Traceability Standard (GTS). Developed by industry, the standard defines the globally-accepted method for uniquely identifying:
■ Trading parties (your suppliers, your own company, your customers, 3rd party carriers)
■ Trading locations (can be any physical location such as a warehouse, packing line, storage facility, receiving dock or store) Traceability for Fresh Fruits and Vegetables Implementation Guide Issue 2, May-2010 All contents copyright © GS1 Page 9 of 57
■ The products your company uses or creates
■ The logistics units your company receives or ships
■ Inbound and outbound shipments The GS1 Global Traceability Standard also defines the essential pieces of information that have to be collected, recorded and shared to ensure one step up, one step down traceability. The standard is applicable to companies of all size and geography.While the GS1 Global Traceability Standard may be implemented independently from any specific technology, best business practices require adoption of bar coding on cases and/or pallets.Businesses are further encouraged to adopt electronic messaging to exchange essential business information. These technologies will be explored in the sections that follow. GS1 is a not-for-profit standards organisation with member affiliates in every country. Together with local/national produce trade associations they are important resources that are able to help your company understand the most effective way to implement traceability with your trading partners. They can also help your company to connect with technology providers that serve the produce industry.Information on how to obtain a copy of the Global Traceability Standard appears in Appendix A1.4.3. Traceability Principles
■ A company must determine what needs to be traced. This is commonly referred to as the“traceable item.” A traceable item can be:□ a product or traded item (e.g. case/carton, consumer item)□ a Logistic Unit (e.g. bin, container)□ a shipment or movement of a product or trade item There must be agreement between trading partners on what the traceable item is. This ensures that both partners are tracking the same thing. Otherwise the chain will be broken. Each Trading Partner must define at least one level of traceable item for each shipment.
■ All traceable items must be uniquely identified and this information is shared between all affected supply chain partners.
■ At a minimum, the identification of products for the purpose of traceability requires:□ The assignment of a unique GS1 Global Trade Item Number (GTIN)□ The assignment of a batch / lot.
■ When a product is reconfigured and/or re-packed, the new product must be assigned a new unique product identification (i.e. GTIN). A linkage must be maintained between the new product and its original inputs.
■ When a Logistic Unit is reconfigured, the new Logistic Unit must be assigned a new unique identification (i.e. SSCC). A linkage must be maintained between the new Logistic Unit and its original input.
■ All supply chain parties must systematically link the physical flow of products with the flow of information about them. Traceable item identification numbers must be communicated on related business documents.
FarmSoft provides an easy to use fresh produce traceability software by integrating the worlds most common fresh produce traceability and food safety and traceability guidelines into the every day operations management.
Each Logistic Unit destined for a packing facility must be uniquely identified. Examples of logistics units include bins, totes, containers, trailers.To uniquely identify logistics units or to participate in electronic commerce, the best practice is to use the GS1 Serialized Shipping Container Code number (SSCC). This number is based on your GS1 Company Prefix number (supplied to you through your local GS1 Member Organisation), thus ensuring global uniqueness.Over time, your company will exhaust its pool of available GS1 SSCC numbers. It is important that you manage the re-use of SSCC numbers so as not to conflict with the logistics units already in the supply chain. An industry best practice is to restrict the use of SSCC numbers for a period of no less than one year.
To assist packers in assigning batch / lot at the pack house, growers should include on their Logistic Unit tag/label, in human-readable format, all relevant grower/harvest information. The information included should enable the creation of a meaningful batch / lot r and could include the harvest crew,field or plot of harvest, date of harvest, etc.
fresh produce traceability for fruit & vegetables
fresh produce traceability for fruit & vegetables
The best practice is to use the GS1 Global Location Number (GLN). GLN is a standard that can be used to uniquely identify your company and its premises. GLN’s can be allocated either by a GS1 Member Organisation or by your company using your GS1 Company Prefix.Additional information about GLN assignment.
Who are the trading parties? ABC Farms grows, harvests, and transports raw product to other companies (pack houses and/or cooperatives) which, in turn, receive, sort, grade and pack raw product received in bulk from ABC Farms into “finished product” configurations.What needs to be traced?ABC Farms is responsible for recording and maintaining information that will enable batch /lot assignment during the packing process. ABC Farms are also responsible for providing this information to its trading partners as product is delivered.How do they accomplish this?ABC Farms harvests their product and transports the raw product in bins or field boxes to their trading partners. As product is harvested, ABC records information related to each day's activity based on commodity, harvest date, field being harvested (i.e. Ranch/Plot, Unit/Block) and harvesting crew. A human-readable “field tag” is generally applied to the bin or field boxes as they are filled. The “field tag'' generally includes information as outlined above. To enable greater granularity during the batch /lot assignment, additional information could include specifics on the actual truck load of raw product being transported to their trading partner.ABC Farms is responsible for conveying the day’s activity/harvest information, (as stipulated in section 2.2) along with the number of units (bins or field boxes), to the trading partner that will be receiving the product. Although this information is contained on “field tags” affixed to each bin or field box, it should also be conveyed via a “receiving” or “trip” ticket containing all the information and that is given to the driver of the vehicle transporting the raw product to ABC’s trading partner.