Food traceability - General aspects

In recent times, questions about food, product quality, safety and new production techniques have multiplied. At a general level, this means that public and private players need to put in place measures to guarantee a high level of consumer protection:

• Firstly, a comprehensive risk analysis system must ensure that citizens live in a society where the risks that could affect them are recognized, assessed and effectively reduced to a socially accepted level by decision-makers;

• secondly, to prevent health crises and ensure that consumers are as fully and transparently informed as possible, we need to speed up the organization of the food chain, which in turn means speeding up the introduction of traceability.

In the minds of consumers, traceability has become a magic word, even if they don't necessarily use it when making a purchase. For them, traceability is an element of reassurance, but it must be conceived not as an element of product quality, but as an intrinsic component of system quality.

It's remarkable that while a great deal of work is underway in 2003, particularly in companies, traceability is still generally in its infancy, and remains a corporate rather than a collective strategy.