Methods for traceability in food production processes involving bulk products

In food processing plants, raw materials are fed into the system in different supply-lots of product, and are processed through different stages. In these stages, raw or intermediate materials are mixed or combined together, and physico-chemical and/or microbiological processes such as heating, concentration, pasteurisation etc. take place. In this setting, traceability consists of the ability to determine for each portion of intermediate or final product, in any part of the plant, its relative composition in terms of supply-lots fed into the system as well as of new lots generated during the production process. Traceability becomes particularly difficult in the very common case when bulk products, such as liquids or grains, are involved in the production chain. Current traceability practices are in most cases unable to directly deal with bulk products, and typically resort to the definition of very large lots to compensate the lack of knowledge about lot composition. As demonstrated in recent food crises, this over-bounding approach has weaknesses in clearly identifying, immediately after risk assessment, the affected product lots, leading to unavoidably wide, expensive and highly impacting recalls. Motivated by these considerations, this paper presents a novel approach to manage traceability of bulk products during production, storage and delivery. It provides a tight definition of lots in terms of their composition and size, thus allowing strict control of the production and supply chains.