FDA takes measure of industry traceability efforts

From the FDA document annoucing traceability hearings, this passage matter of factly details industry efforts aiming toward traceability, including the efforts of tomato growers, Wal-Mart and the traceability initiative:




F. Industry Product Tracing Systems That Are in Use or Under Development in the United States
1. Commodity-Specific Efforts Various recordkeeping and other practices designed to enhance product tracing systems are already carried out by industry within the food supply chain. For instance, to better monitor food safety practices of growers, the California cantaloupe industry has incorporated product tracing requirements that involve maintaining information such as packing date, field, and packing crew as part of their State marketing order (Ref. 9). Similarly, the California Tomato Farmers cooperative has instituted documentation requirements in its membership agreement with growers to facilitate one up/one down tracking and product tracing. The documentation of packed tomatoes must include information about the source (Le., grower, production location, lot identification, personnel/crew involved in the harvest of the product) and about the customer receiving the product. A system to track and trace tomatoes back to supply source and forward to customers must be developed and tested annually (Ref. 10). Stakeholders have developed commodity-specific food safety guidelines for the entire supply chain for three commodities: Melons (Ref. 11), tomatoes (Ref. 8), and lettuce and leafy greens (Ref. 12).
2. Buyer-Led Initiatives
Large food retailers, such as supermarket chains, have become more active in ensuring the safety of the food products they purchase. One example of this is the increasing use of independent third-party food safety audits of grower and shipper operations to verify compliance with good agricultural and manufacturing practices. These practices generally include requirements that the grower or shipper maintain records that facilitate the tracing of product produced, handled, or processed in order to pass an audit. For example, in February 2008, Wal-Mart, Inc., became the first U.S. grocery chain to require suppliers of its private label and other food products to have their factories certified against one of the internationally-recognized Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) standards (Ref. 13). The GFSI standard for traceability requires the supplier to develop and maintain appropriate procedures and systems to ensure (1) identification of any out-sourced product, ingredient, or service; (2) complete records of batches of in-process or final product and packaging throughout the production process; and (3) record of purchaser and delivery destination for all product supplied (Ref. 14).
3. Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI)
In "october 2007, the Produce Marketing Association (PMA), the United Fresh Produce Association (UFPA), and the Canadian Produce Marketing Association (CPMA) initiated the joint PTI (Ref. 15). The PTI now includes more than 50 companies, including distributors, grower-shippers, and retailers. A principal objective of the PTI is to drive adoption of consistent "traceability best practices" throughout the produce supply chain from "field to fork." In pursuing the goal of broad adoption of tracking and product tracing standards and practices, the PTI has established a timeline for a series of milestones for recording, tracking, and product tracing data on produce shipments. These milestones include establishing company prefixes; establishing an identification number for location; assigning global trade item numbers (GTINs) to produce cases; showing GTINs, lot numbers, and packing/harvesting dates on each case; encoding this information in bar codes; and reading and storing the information at each point in the supply chain. The PTI also calls for tracking and product tracing standards to be adopted at the case level initially, followed by standards for item-level coding (Refs. 5 and 16).