The demand for traceability in the postharvest system is expected to continue to grow. This will partially be driven by market demands for better visibility and assurance of food safety as well as a technology push from product identification and information system providers. As the sophistication of the systems increases, the need to be able to trace product in ever smaller units will become important. With reducing size of the identifiable units (IUs), the ability to link two small sized units eventually becomes a statistical problem as it is no longer possible to describe the exact membership of each output unit based on some known input unit. The ability to trace product at this lower level opens up opportunities to add new tools to the information system.
The traceability system is a subset of a postharvest information system and is one of the main activities, which have a responsibility shared across the entire supply chain. Traceability requirements will continue to drive better integration of individual information systems within the supply chain and these will, in turn, lead to better vertical integration of individual supply chains.