Food traceability requires that all stakeholders
within the food supply chain, including agriculture and feed producers, food
manufacturers, retailers, etc., must be able to identify the source of all raw materials
and ingredients and also to whom the products have been sold. The food companies
must apply identification systems and data-handling procedures, and these must be
integrated into their quality management system. The sector encompassing IT centers
ought to find a reasonable compromise between the simple, step-by-step passing
of traceable unit IDs for the neighboring actors, and the accumulated enormously
huge databases of the actors. The traceability system is to provide services for the
supply chain actors on a cooperative basis aimed at mutual interests