3. Traceability limits

When a company in the food sector wishes to implement traceability for its products, it must take into account several external constraints:

• regulatory ;

• contractual (customer demand) ;

• (trade-off between risk and cost of solutions) ;

• consumer wishes.

Consequently, the methods used to achieve the same result vary from one industry to another, and especially from one link in the chain to another.

Professionals consider traceability to have two distinct aspects:

• information flow routing mechanisms, which must be designed to ensure that there is no on-line loss of information at each interface, i.e. between successive links in the same...