How To Overcome The Challenges Of Food Industry Traceability

By Sam Lewis

Traceability is both a necessary and complicated endeavor for the food industry. Beyond knowing where your products are and assisting your food safety efforts, traceability undertakings can help your company become more efficient and can help bolster its profits. But, getting to a point where traceability works to do all those things for you can be a long, winding road filled with questions. Luckily, there are an abundance of resources to help get you where you want to go. Here, Dr. Jennifer McEntire, VP of food safety & technology at United Fresh Produce Association, answers a few of my questions about traceability in the food and beverage industry.

Food Online: What are some benefits, outside of product tracking and enhanced food safety practices, that traceability endeavors bring to the table?

McEntire: Increasingly, consumers want to know where their food comes from. Traceability is the tool to connect consumers to their food. And if you’re making a claim about production practices related to the food, such as organic, sustainably produced, etc., traceability helps verify that claim.

Food Online: What are some key elements of a successful food traceability system?

McEntire: It’s about establishing connections between inputs and outputs in as granular a fashion as is possible. The one-forward, one-back traceability regulations stemming from the 2002 Bioterrorism Act make traceability sound simpler than it is. Ideally, companies would be able to quickly know which lots of ingredients (as assigned by the ingredient manufacturer) went into which products, how the finished products were lot coded, and who they were shipped to, and when. Lot numbers are often replaced with license plate numbers, people forget about donations and sales in the company store, and suddenly you don’t have full traceability.

Food Online: If a company is considering implementing an electronic traceability system, what features should they be looking for and how can adaptation to the system be made easier?

McEntire: The most important thing for a company to consider is what exactly it needs. In other words, what problem is the company trying to solve? There are many solutions out there that do all kinds of things. Develop a spec sheet before speaking to any vendors so that you remain focused on your business needs. It’s also important to recognize if you’ll simply be taking what you do today in manual form and doing it in an electronic system, or if you’ll actually be capturing new data that wasn’t captured before.

Food Online: What are some difference between mock recall exercises and traceability exercises and what are the reasons to treat them separately and perform them separately?

McEntire: A mock recall should encompass aspects of communication and decision making. Also, by the time a company decides to recall a product, they probably have a good idea of the scope of the recall. The traceability aspect of most mock recalls is pretty simplistic, assuming that a lot number is already known. This is in stark contrast to an outbreak investigation, when a traceback — from the perspective of the public health agencies — is used to focus several suspect products down to a single lot number or single location as multiple products are traced to a point of convergence.

Food Online: What resources are available to learn more about traceability, its best practices, and how implementing those best practices can help your company?

McEntire:  One of the best places for education on traceability is the Global Food Traceability Center, which has a resource library. Additionally, GS1 US has several educational resources about their standards. In addition to those resources, Kristen Spotz, senior manager of food safety and quality assurance at the Grocery Manufacturer's Association (GMA) and I will be joining Food Online at 1pm EDT on November 8 to answer any questions you may have about traceability. Register here.

About Jennifer McEntire 
Jennifer McEntire, PhD, VP food safety and technology at United Fresh Produce Association, serves as the organizations top food safety resource, supporting both science and policy issues. A food microbiologist by background, she has always worked in the Washington, DC area, bringing the scientific perspective to food safety regulatory issues. She was previously Vice President of Science Operations at the Grocery Manufacturers Association, overseeing the microbiology laboratory, process authority team, and claims laboratory. She has also had roles as VP and Chief Science Officer at The Acheson Group and as the Senior Staff Scientist and Director of Science & Technology Projects at the Institute of Food Technologists. McEntire earned a PhD from Rutgers University and received a Bachelor of Science with Distinction, magna cum laude, in food science from the University of Delaware. She is a member of IFT where she serves as an advisory board member of the Global Food Traceability Center. She also belongs to the International Association for Food Protection, and serves on the board of Phi Tau Sigma, the food science honorary society.

About Kristen Spotz
Kristen Spotz is the Senior Manager of Food Safety and Quality Assurance at the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), Washington, D.C., representing the world’s leading food, beverage, and consumer products companies. 

Kristen has an extensive background in sanitation, continuous improvement, quality systems management and change control.  At GMA, Ms. Spotz is the staff liaison for the GMA allergen committee.  In addition, she has led different working groups that assess and comment on various aspects of FSMA to include the economic along with the environmental impact of specific rules under FSMA.  In addition, she is a HACCP trainer and trainer for the Preventive Controls for Human Food course.  Kristen reviews and offers extensive feedback on HACCP plans along with Food Safety plans for GMA member companies and is also an active member of GMA’s sanitation sharegroup group.  Prior to her role at GMA, Ms. Spotz was a Quality Engineer along with a Quality Supervisor in a wide range of fields including medical device, snack foods and dietary supplements.   She has both designed and managed the environmental and finished product testing programs at many facilities and implemented numerous programs to improve the quality, safety, and consistency of products.

Ms. Spotz holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of Central Florida where she graduated Cum laude.  She is trained in HACCP through the International HACCP Alliance and has completed the FDA recognized training for a Preventive Controls Qualified Individual (PCQI).