Tracing Meat & Poultry

MICHAEL GARRY

Driven by high-profile recall cases involving spinach, peppers and other commodities, the produce industry has aggressively addressed the traceability of its products through what is known as the Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI). Now the meat and poultry industry is following suit.

Steve Arens, GS1 US; Douglas Bailey, USDA.

The initial step is the publication last month of a free document called “Traceability for Meat and Poultry: U.S. Implementation Guide,” which covers traceability from the supplier/packer to the retail store. Created by mpXML, the logistics standards group for meat and poultry, the guide covers the minimum requirements for traceability as well as best practices. Members of mpXML include Wegmans Food Markets, Wal-Mart Stores, Safeway, H.E. Butt Grocery, Costco Wholesale and Supervalu. The guide is available for free at www.mpxml.org.

The guide helps companies understand what they “need to be doing now and in the future to capture and communicate traceability information [for meat and poultry] to their trading partners and to consumers,” said Richard Vander Horst, director of project support services, Wegmans, Rochester, N.Y., and a co-founder and current board member of mpXML. Retailers and suppliers “now have the practical ‘how-to’ guidance and alignment of the meat and poultry trade associations around this guidance.”

The basic requirements for traceability in the meat and poultry supply chain is that each case of product is identified with a GTIN (global trade item number) and a lot number linking the product to the original lot from which it came. All other shipment levels — from the pallet to the item — need to be associated with the case, with the GS1-128 bar code the preferred case identifier. “Case is king,” said Douglas Bailey, chief information officer and deputy administrator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Marketing Service, who spoke about the guide last month at the U Connect conference in San Antonio.

The guide is based on GS1 standards, which only go back as far as the supplier/packer. Traceability is still required at the live animal production process, but “each live animal supply chain, given their different production practices and regulations, will need to refine its own system for live animal traceability,” said Vander Horst.

Bailey regards the guide as a stepping stone to a more formal program comparable to PTI, with milestones for the adoption of traceability standards and practices. “My expectation is that the meat and poultry trade associations that worked together to create the guide will work together to agree on milestone content and target dates,” he said. “That process should begin shortly now that the guide is in place.”

But Blake Ashby, executive vice president, mpXML, noted that the meat and poultry supply chain is further along in the adoption of traceability standards than the produce industry and would not need to “catch up” in the way the produce industry does. Unlike produce suppliers, “the vast majority of [meat and poultry] suppliers already use case codes and assign lot/batch numbers, and we have one-up one-down traceability,” he said. “Suppliers can say where they sent product; retailers can say where they got product from.”

Still, the guide lays out a roadmap to new traceability standards and technologies — notably the GS1 DataBar, which can hold all of the data needed for traceability — as well as capturing what is considered minimum requirements today. “MpXML thought it important that there be a single document capturing necessary practices to serve as a benchmark for suppliers and retailers,” Ashby said.

Wegmans works “to follow the guidelines as they are outlined in the guide,” said Vander Horst. “More importantly, as we are upgrading, replacing and enhancing our technology capabilities, we are keeping these new guidelines in mind and implementing solutions that respect the industry direction.”

COMPLICATING FACTORS

In his presentation, Bailey pointed out what he considers to be “complicating factors” in meat and poultry traceability that the guide focuses on clarifying. One is variation in the interpretation of packaging terminology such as case ready and tray ready. “Case ready means one thing to somebody, and a different thing to somebody else,” he said. The guide defines case ready for fixed-weight and variable-weight/prepriced products as being products that are delivered to the retailer ready for sale to the consumer, while case-ready product that is variable weight but unpriced is left for the retailer to provide final labeling.

Tray ready is defined as processed and bulk-packed into variable-weight sealed bags by the supplier, and packaged for consumer sale and labeled by the retailer. Store processed is processed, packaged and labeled for consumer sale by the retailer.

Another complicating factor is the variable-weight nature of many meat and poultry products. This affects what can be included in the bar code. Fixed-weight products have a UPC bar code that can be scanned to retrieve a price, but variable-weight products need to have the price in the bar code. But when price is included in the bar code, there is no room for the GTIN, so a smaller proprietary code is used. At the case level, serial numbers and net weight are incorporated in bar codes but that leaves no room for lot numbers. As a result, to maintain traceability, retailers and suppliers need to associate the serial number to a lot number in their records, said Bailey.

Retailers and suppliers should also employ ASNs (advanced ship notices) with GTINs, lot numbers and serial numbers to enhance traceability, noted Bailey. When a shipment is received, retailers that use ASNs only need to scan the serial shipping container code on the pallet rather than each case individually, the guide points out.

A third complicating factor is associated with store-processed product. When primal product is transformed and repackaged at the store, the retailer becomes the new owner, responsible for creating a GTIN and lot number for each new product and linking those numbers to comparable numbers for the source product. “This doesn't always happen as nicely or neatly as it should,” said Bailey.

A fourth complicating factor is that the lot number is not always present on consumer items. Since the lot number can't be encoded in current bar codes, the alternative is for it to be included in human readable information along with brand owner and description, observed Bailey. If the lot number is not available, then the lot control date (such as the sell-by date, use-by date, production date or packaging date) can be used for traceability.

The last complicating factor is that some companies opt out of using traceability standards. “Requests that vary from standard industry guidance will add cost and complexity, as well as risk, to traceability systems,” said Bailey. “Companies need to understand and build the standard guidance into their traceability plans.”

The next step in the traceability of meat and poultry will involve defining “critical tracking events” along the supply chain, such as product creation, product shipment and sale to consumer, and capturing the relevant traceability data at each event through scanning bar codes on the case, pallet or invoice. For retailers, one such critical juncture is the transfer of products from the retail or wholesale warehouse to the store.

The GS1 DataBar, the new breed of bar code that is initially being used on coupons and loose produce, has much greater capacity in its “expanded stacked” version than the traditional UPC bar code and thus can accommodate such data as sell-by date, weight, price, serial number and lot number in addition to the GTIN. “With the DataBar, traceability improves dramatically,” said Bailey. “You can capture all the traceability information you need.”

In addition, the DataBar allows traceability from the supplier to the end consumer. “It answers the question, ‘Was product sold to consumers, and if so, when and where?’” said Vander Horst.

But unlike DataBar applications for coupons and loose produce, the DataBar applications for meat, poultry and seafood are not yet being tested by any U.S. retailers, said Steve Arens, director of strategic partnerships at GS1 US. The sunrise date for meat and poultry applications is Jan. 1, 2014.

Retailer adoption of the DataBar for meat and poultry will depend on the ability of a given retailer's POS hardware and software “to read, translate and push forward the data that the DataBar contains,” said Vander Horst. “POS investments are a large investment in both dollars and time for retailers and tend to have long life spans; if a retailer's POS system cannot handle DataBar as is, the retailer will have to decide if the DataBar will be enough reason to upgrade the system ahead of schedule.”

Next: Seafood Traceability Guidelines

THE NATIONAL FISHERIES INSTITUTE (NFI), Washington, and GS1 US are collaborating on the development of GS1 US Guidelines for Seafood Traceability in an effort to enhance product tracing and support food safety, said Steve Arens, senior director, GS1 US, Lawrenceville, N.J.

In a session last month at U Connect 2010, Arens said the final guidelines should be available by September or October. The guidelines will cover traceability from “vessel to retailer,” including raw materials, ingredients, food contact packaging and finished goods. In developing the traceability guidelines, NFI and GS1 US are “anticipating what the FDA and the FSIS are going to ask the industry to do,” said Arens.