1.1 Quality and safety: issues
The term ‘quality’ has become a focus point in all discussions regarding the production and provision of food products to markets and consumers – quality in the broad sense of serving the consumers' needs (see also the early publication by Oakland, 1998) by providing them with the right product, at the right time, and with the right service. In today's competitive food markets, the quality approach is a precondition for sustainable market acceptance. It is a core pillar in the sustainability of enterprises and sectors, which builds on economic viability, quality orientation, ethical concerns, and an appropriate embedment in its environment.
In an enterprise, a sustainable delivery of quality is a result of a comprehensive effort. It involves the implementation of a quality approach at all levels of activities, ranging from enterprise management to process organisation, process management, and product control. Enterprise quality systems build on routine quality assurance and improvement activities that might encompass one or several of these levels. However, most food quality systems focus on system activities at several levels, involving process organisation, process management and product control.
Food safety is an inherent element of quality. It receives special attention not only by enterprises, but also by policy and legislation, because of its key importance for consumers' health, and the responsibility for food safety by enterprises and policy alike. Globalisation and industrialisation in the production and provision of food has increased the potential risk in food safety and has initiated increased efforts and controls in food safety assurance.
The efficient ‘transportation’ of quality from the farm, and any of the subsequent stages of processing and trade to the consumer as the final customer, requires efforts in cooperation along the chain. The dependency of food quality and safety from activities at all stages in the chain makes chain cooperation a prerequisite of any advanced quality assurance scheme, including food safety. Such cooperation might build on individual arrangements, sector agreements, or on any other way that avoids the loss and supports the gain of quality along the chain.
Chain cooperation has become a crucial element in quality assurance, and especially in food safety initiatives in the food sector. However, in the food sector, chains usually develop dynamically in a network of interconnected enterprises, with constantly changing lines of supplier-customer relationships. In this scenario, chain cooperation is based on network cooperation – or, in other words, on sector agreements.
The quality guarantee that one can derive from the implementation of a quality system depends on the evaluation of the system as a whole. Quality and food safety deficiencies at any stage might remain with the product throughout the remaining stages, until it reaches the consumer. The most crucial need for guarantees involves guarantees for food safety. These constitute the baseline guarantee level and the prerequisite for consumers' trust and market acceptance (Henson and Hooker, 2001; Verbeke, 2005).
The delivery of quality guarantees is based on controls, both, in the organisation of processes (process controls) and in process management (management controls). However, for the delivery of guarantees, these controls need to be integrated into a comprehensive scheme (quality program) that could serve as a cooperation platform for enterprises within supply chains and networks and provide a basis for communication with consumers.
Key issues involve agreements on chain-encompassing quality assurance schemes, and the ability to identify the product flow through the production chain clearly, by linking the different product entities that are being produced and traded at the different stages of the chain, from the farm to the consumer as the final customer, and their quality status (tracking and tracing capability).
The following sections cover the development path from tracking and tracing towards quality assurance in food chains, the organisational concepts and quality programs for implementation, and the role of information and communication systems for operational efficiency.
1.2 Tracking and tracing through chains and networks
The tracking and tracing of food products throughout the food chain has become a dominant issue in discussions on food quality and, especially, on the assurance of food safety (Lobb, 2005). They allow, for any product and from any stage within the chain, identification of the source (backward tracing) and its destination (forward tracing). This supports the (backward) identification of sources of product deficiencies, and the (forward) isolation of any other product that might have been affected by these sources. Tracking and tracing capabilities support consumer protection in case of food contamination. Furthermore, they support the communication of the quality status of products on their way through the food chain, and provide the basis for the delivery of quality guarantees at each stage of the chain and towards the consumers at the final stage.
However, it should be noted that, beyond this discussion line, the organisation of tracking and tracing schemes (TT schemes) has also a managerial dimension in supporting efficiency in the logistics chain (supply chain) from the source (farms) to the final destination (the consumer). In fact, the managerial dimension has been at the centre point of initial discussions on tracking and tracing schemes, not just in the food sector but in other sectors as well (Golan et al., 2004).
This emphasises the global relevance of tracking and tracing schemes and their role as a baseline feature, not only for the delivery of guarantees for food safety and quality but also for logistics efficiency, which is at the core of enterprises' economic interests.
From a historical point of view, the TT schemes evolved from enterprise internal efforts and were subsequently extended to supply chains and networks. This historic development path also characterises a path of increasing complexity. The identification of product units and the monitoring of their movements inside an enterprise require less coordination efforts than is necessary in supply chains and, especially, in a sector as a whole, with its larger number of enterprises and different and ever-changing trade relationships.
The identification of product units and the monitoring of their movements is a problem that is easy to solve, if product modification during the various stages of a supply chain process do not affect the composition of the product. The most complex TT scenarios concern composite convenience products or commodity products, where an individual ‘product unit’ cannot be based on a physical product element (e.g. a piece of grain), but needs to be based on logistics elements (batches) that might involve production plots, transportation trucks, or storage units of any kind (Golan et al., 2004; Schiefer, 2006; Fritz and Schiefer, 2009; Schiefer and Reiche, 2013). The linkage of these different batches in a batch sequence generates the production flow with its modifications, and provides the basis for tracking and tracing activities.
