DUBAI: Some years ago, I bought brown rice that promptly turned white after a wash. I bought brown sugar and honey that were really wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Food adulteration has been in business since the middle ages. We as consumers deserve to know the origins of what we buy, be it food or clothes or anything else.

We should be able to trace the raw materials, and entire chain of custody down to the retailer. We care about the product’s embedded carbon emission and recycled content. Complex supply chains make traceability tricky, but it help to validate the authenticity and sustainability claims of the products we buy.

Regulators promoting a Circular Economy are devising rules to hold producers responsible for what happens to the products and packaging they sell. Extended producer responsibility requires certification and auditability, which can be credibly performed through a traceability solution.

The term ‘traceability’ appeared in the agribusiness in the 1990s. But we can trace its etymological origin to the French phrase that suggests control. “Contre-rolle literally means “counter-roll”. In other words, the record of a document in a registry or an account book – archived and used to verify other such documents.

Complicated as it sounds, it was a simple solution to keep written records honest, thus avoiding any manipulation. In the absence of surveillance cameras, the document’s authenticity was controlled by written notation stored in another location. This was an effective document archival technique especially for judicial records.

In 1996, a sudden outbreak of the Mad Cow disease caused a crisis of consumer confidence and disrupted the beef industry. This fatal neurodegenerative disease in cattle triggered the eventual food law in 2005 in the European Union (EU) that was titled Traceability – placing the responsibility of food safety on businesses. The law required food business operators to be able to identify from whom and to whom a product had been supplied. They were required to have systems and procedures in place to make such information available to the authorities upon request.

Courtesy: Khaleej Times