This article is part of Food Tank’s primer series, “Food Tank Explains.” Each installment unpacks the ideas, innovations, and challenges shaping today’s food and agriculture systems, offering clear insights into complex topics. To explore more articles in the series, click here.
Food traceability is the ability to track food products and ingredients through every stage of the supply chain—from production and processing to distribution and retail. As global food and agriculture supply chains grow more complex, with ingredients often traveling thousands of miles and passing through multiple hands, traceability systems can help document and connect information about where food comes from and how it was produced.
“Food systems are only as strong as the trust and transparency behind them,” Mark Kaplan, Co-Founder and Chief Sustainability Officer at Wholechain, tells Food Tank. “Traceability and data standards are the foundation that allows food to move fairly, safely, and sustainably across the globe.”
Food traceability plays a central role in managing food safety risks. Unsafe food causes 600 million cases of foodborne illness and 420,000 deaths each year globally, according to the World Health Organization. The burden falls disproportionately on low-income countries, conflict-affected populations, migrants, and women, and children under 5 account for 40 percent of cases and 125,000 deaths annually.
By linking data across production, processing, and distribution, traceability systems allow investigators to rapidly detect potential risks and trace hazardous products back to their source, reducing the spread of contamination. According to the World Bank Group, a food safety management system cannot be truly effective unless it includes a well-established traceability component.
Traceability systems provide greater visibility across the food supply chain, supporting oversight of labor practices and accountability for environmental marketing claims.
The agricultural and seafood production industries rank among the world’s most dangerous occupations due to the use of heavy machinery, exposure to chemicals and the elements, and long hours. Meanwhile, agricultural workers receive limited occupational health protection and investigations have linked seafood supply chains to forced labor, slavery at sea, wage theft, deceptive or coercive recruitment, and physical abuse aboard distant-water fishing vessels.
Evidence of human trafficking aboard distant water vessels has grown exponentially in the past few years. Unethical activity plagues the seafood industry, Kaplan says. Food traceability can help increase visibility into labor exploitation and abuse hidden within supply chains, enabling regulators to track unfair labor practices and consumers to make more informed purchases.
Traceability also supports greater accountability for sustainability-related claims. Consumers are increasingly interested in sustainably sourced and produced products, but weak oversight and opaque supply chains have facilitated the rise of greenwashing, the practice of using deceptive environmental advertising to boost product sales.
According to Changing Markets’ research, greenwashing in the food sector is rampant, with many environmental claims like ‘carbon neutral’, ‘climate positive’ and ‘net zero’ lacking substantiation. By helping verify sustainability claims, traceability helps reduce opportunities for food companies to capitalize on consumers’ environmental concerns without taking any positive environmental action.
Traceability systems can also create operational benefits for businesses. Research suggests that digital traceability systems can improve efficiency, optimize resource allocation and use, and reduce costs across supply chains.
And the market for products backed by traceability claims continues to grow, providing an opportunity for businesses. “The potential for traceability can unlock so much more value for businesses,” says Alex Golub, Sustainability Director at Acme Smoked Fish and Chair of Sea Pact. “If consumers know where their food is coming from, harvesters can really have those assurances, and that transparency can ripple through.”
Food traceability adoption varies widely, with governments and private companies implementing different standards, technologies, and regulatory frameworks. The European Union has established some of the world’s most comprehensive requirements, mandating that food businesses track products across all stages of production, processing, and distribution.
Japan, Australia, Finland, France, Italy, and South Korea have also adopted digital systems ranging from electronic livestock databases to blockchain-enabled QR codes and cloud-based supply chain platforms.
Adoption also differs by industry, with seafood emerging as one of the most advanced sectors for traceability. “No other commodity has advanced as far along the digital traceability journey as seafood,” Huw Thomas, Executive Director of the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability, tells Food Tank. To explain the sector’s early investment in digital tracking systems, Thomas points to the industry’s complex international supply chains and growing regulatory pressure.
As governments and companies expand digital traceability systems, the World Bank and research published in the Journal of Foods argue that technology alone will not solve the food system’s transparency challenges. Standardization across industries and supply chains is essential, Thomas explains.
Organizations like the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Economic Forum emphasize that regulatory frameworks, global standards, and cross-sector cooperation will play a central role in determining how and whether traceability systems are adopted and enforced.
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Photo courtesy of Norbert Buduczki
