How Traceability Technologies Connect The Food-Safety Dots

By Paula Feldman, director, Business Intelligence, PMMI

Traceability systems for food and beverage companies run the gamut from pen and paper to high-powered software

U.S. President Barack Obama signed The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) in 2011, against the backdrop of a decade of high-profile foodborne illness outbreaks. Now, three years later, U.S. companies are waiting to see the nuts-and-bolts logistics of the law that takes food safety from reaction to prevention. PMMI, The Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies, explored food manufacturers’ perceptions of FSMA in its 2014 study, Food Safety and Traceability. Manufacturers know FSMA will require data collection, but they don’t know what shape that will take.

“The FDA has the authority to collect data around product tracking. They have not yet specified what this will look like, though it is supposed to be for high-risk food,” says a third-party consultant interviewed for the PMMI report. “I think it will require more detail around specific lots, codes, and dates. These are the key things that are needed, and systems are now coming online that accomplish this. More companies are going to adopt these systems; right now it is fairly human-intensive to write everything down.”

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