Getting Ready for the FDA's New Food Traceability Guidelines

For food and beverage companies like yours, few topics are more crucial than traceability. Food safety, which is intimately related to brand reputation and, in the end, your organization's profitability, necessitates the collection, secure storage, and high visibility of critical ingredient and product data.

Furthermore, your customers expect it: according to the Center for Food Integrity, 65 percent of consumers want to know more about their food's origins. The legal standards for traceability will soon be considerably stricter, thanks to the FDA's new proposed Requirements for Additional Traceability Records for Certain Foods (or the "Proposed Rule for Food Traceability").

We'll look at how food traceability rules have evolved over time in this post, as well as what the new proposed rule means for your business. Then we'll wrap up with a quick look at how enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems may help you stay compliant as rules get more stringent.

Past Traceability Guidelines

Many industry professionals believe that the FDA's Good Manufacturing Practices were the first traceability standards, but this is not the case—the Bioterrorism Act of 2002 introduced the "one step back, one step forward" approach for tracing food and beverage products in the supply chain.

However, for many years, the more strict GS1 Standards for traceability were regarded best practices, as food and beverage companies have long recognized the significant costs of contaminations, withdrawals, and recalls. However, because these guidelines are not enforceable by law, companies' techniques to tracking product information differed.

Then, in 2011, the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) was passed, which added to the industry's transparency and safety. In particular, Section 204 gave the FDA permission to run trial traceability programs, analyze other worldwide standards, and construct a set of recordkeeping requirements, as well as alter and update their traceability laws in the future.

Fast forward to 2020, and the start of the New Era of Smarter Food Safety was declared as the next major development on this front. The FDA released the Proposed Rule for Food Traceability as part of its update in September of that year, and we anticipate more adjustments and, eventually, a finalized set of requirements.

What's the Best Way to Get Ready for More Traceability Requirements?

Clearly, the new law introduces a slew of new rules, phrases, and requirements for food and beverage companies. With the onus on your company to capture and retain so many additional facts and documents, it's clear that paper-based systems will be insufficient in the future if you've stuck to old-school ways thus far.

A single, digital database is required not only to store so much data, but also to retrieve it quickly in the event of an emergency food safety scenario. As a cross-functional platform that updates in real time as new facts and figures come in, ERP technology serves this role, giving you the agility to react in time to avoid undesirable outcomes while also giving you the confidence that everything is correct and up-to-date.

Smart sensors, scales, and imaging technology, as well as handheld barcode and QR code scanners, may all be integrated with purpose-built solutions like ReposiTrak Inc. to automate the data collecting process. With this feature, recording the necessary KDEs at each CTE becomes a much easier and faster operation, and the risk of human error is eliminated.

Automatically scheduled compliance inspections and expedited recall features are two other ways that food and beverage ERP systems can help you with your traceability initiatives. These not only ensure that all important steps in the tracking process are completed correctly every time, but they also protect you in the event of a mishap by tracking contaminations back to their source and automating elements of the recall process.

🎧 Listen to our podcast: https://pod.co/podcastlive/how-supply-chain-management-works