2007/710 Review of traceability and freshness

By Food Innovation Partners, Allan Bremner & Associates

Australia enjoys a high level of food quality from a clean safe environment, which is being used to brand and position them forefront of the consumers mind. However, like many other countries, we face the challenge of continually improving food quality. In Australia's seafood industry, traceability systems are the norm in most of the catching and harvesting sectors; the catch sector uses many sophisticated electronic instruments and devices in their operations and that electronic communications and computer use are wide spread on board, dockside and in processors. Traceability should be viewed as an opportunity, not an imposition.

Products and services have customarily been controlled by different paradigms, but the advent of smart packaging, product sensors and traceability systems and the integrating technologies of intelligent device networking can now serve to bring them together and a product and a service are supplied simultaneously. A simple example is that of identifying goods with tags or bar codes. These are used in the production sense to provide the manufacturer with a means of identifying the goods and of following their history of manufacture from raw materials, the processes used and the packaging but they can also be thought of in the service sense as providing information to the end user and thus enhancing the product's value. Information is the new value-added.

Products alone and services alone do not provide competitive advantages as either a product, or a service, can easily be copied by a competitor. The offering of both product and service provides a competitive edge that is less easily copied and helps lock in the information feed back loop with the customer.

This report was embargoed as commercial in confidence until the conclusion of the CRC and is now available for download below