AgroTRACE: A Complete Fresh Fruits and Vegetables Traceability System

Abstract

The fresh food industry recognizes the importance of traceability and food safety; however, some sectors are considered more advanced than others in implementing the relevant processes throughout the supply chain. At the international level, the branches of industry and the key players in the management of the supply chain work together to co-create an integrated and consolidated traceability process in order to benefit all the subcategories of fresh food products, such as seafood, dairy, baked goods, meat, poultry, fruits and vegetables. Therefore, an effective tracking process needs to be based on a standard approach to fresh produce and its location recognition, while at the same time remaining flexible in the individual roles and responsibilities of the various links in the supply chain within the ecosystem. While many trading partners already have interfaces with external systems and processes for some level of traceability of their products, the next necessary step towards an integrated approach is to identify interoperability opportunities between internal and external processes across the food industry. Towards this direction, the AgroTRACE system aims to achieve end-to-end traceability of a fresh product supply chain through the deployment system, which combines internal and external tracking processes, so that each user is able to identify the immediate source and immediate recipient of the products. The system applies the “one step up, one step down” principle to provide effective tracking in the supply chain. In particular, each distinct product is recognized globally and in a unique way so that it can be located upstream and downstream of the supply chain. The innovation of the proposed system is further enhanced by the fact that the tracking will go beyond the route from field to field and covers the part of recycling (biomass, compost, etc.), in the context of the circular economy. That is, implement traceability from the field-to the shelf-to the field. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)