Since the 2002 Farm Bill mandated country of origin labeling (COOL) for seafood and other food products, the ability and responsibility of companies to trace their product throughout the supply chain has become increasingly relevant. Legislatively, not much has changed since the Farm Bill’s 2009 compliance date. However, the Food Safety and Tracking Improvement Act proposes to establish a national traceability system under Food and Drug Administration jurisdiction.
The system would use electronic records that identify each sale, purchase or trade of the product and its ingredients, as well as the parties involved in those transactions. It’s still in the first step of the legislative process, but the writing is on the wall, says Phil Fitzpatrick, a traceability consultant in Naples, Fla.
“There’s a lot of movement to improve inspections and the speed from which recalls can be done,” he says. “The FDA says it takes three months to track down where an offending item has come from, which is unacceptable. Traceability and the pace at which a recall can be enacted have to improve.”
Traceability is the ability to follow the movement of a food product through its stages of production, processing and distribution. That would be easy if the product you buy is the same as the product you sell, but when it comes to seafood, that’s typically not the case.
“Take an item like pollock,” says Fitzpatrick. “It might be fished out of the Gulf of Alaska, processed on a boat, shipped to China for [further] processing, shipped back to the United States to an importer and then sold. That presents some challenges when it comes to traceability.”
Click here to read the rest of the feature on traceability. Written by SeaFood Business Contributing Editor Lauren Kramer, the story ran in the February issue of SeaFood Business magazine.
