TRACEABILITY FOR SUMMERKIWI™

The themes of nutritional safety and of how to grant it are nowadays an additional value for the European consumer. That is why SUMMERKIWI™ has adopted a system of traceability and backwards-traceability.

With the term “traceability” we intend the information process following the product from hill to dale along the supply chain, while with the term “backward-traceability” we mean the opposite process, allowing to run over the information diffused along the supply chain again, this time from dale up to the hill.

Cee Regulation n.178/2002 of 28 January 2002, in force since the 1st January 2005, defines traceability as: “The possibility of rebuilding and following the process of a nourishment, a fodder, an animal destined to animal reproduction, or of any substance destined to or fit for becoming part of a nourishment or of a fodder, along all phases of production, transformation and distribution”.

So supply chain’s traceability or backwards traceability is:

•the capability of rebuilding the history and of following the usage of a product by means of reported identifications about material flows and supply chain’s operators
•the identification of the firms which have contributed to the production of a certain food product, based on the monitoring of material flows from the producer of raw materials to the final consumer.

The control over the supply chain is believable only if traceability is possible, it can be proved by documents and it embraces the whole supply chain. The most important part of the supply chain is constituted by all the firms contributing to the product realisation.

To achieve real traceability, the most important thing is not rebuilding the geographical origin or the place of transformation and/or packaging of the product, but knowing the name of the firms involved in the production, or directly responsible for it.

Traceability is referred to each single part of the product, and it must allow to identify each firm which has had a role in the formation of that part. It is therefore an instrument depending on the pieces of information we intend to offer. The subject choosing the kind of information to give is the consumer.