Conclusion

In practice, until the mid-1990s, traceability was the prerogative of official quality certifications, forming part of their specificity, credibility and brand image. It was, as it were, "encapsulated" within these approaches, which owed part of their economic value to it. Secondly, supermarket chains have strengthened their position, firstly by developing their own brands which imitate and compete with manufacturers' brands and, more recently, quality brands referring to product origin or production methods. At this level, they compete with official quality certifications to capture the value linked to differentiation. This corresponds to a first wave of general diffusion of traceability, which is promoted to consumers as such, to signal the transparency and reliability of the channels through which products pass. Here again, traceability is used to support differentiation strategies....