Traceability determines how materials, packaging, products, processing aids, and so forth have moved through the supply chain. Often broken down into two aspects, track and trace, traceability systems underpin food safety, food quality, sustainability claims, and transactional mechanisms to prevent food fraud and food defense incidents.
Tracing is the ability to follow a product backward from the retail shelf to the manufacturer, the ingredient supplier, and their suppliers. Tracking involves following material from suppliers, such as a spice, through to the spice mix and then all the finished products and their destinations where the spice mix was used as an ingredient and/or dusting material. The granularity of traceability is also essential—i.e., the level of detail in which we can determine traceability. Granularity reflects the time element of the traceable unit—e.g., production for one week, one day, one shift, the product produced between the last two quality control checks, and the distance element over which the traceability operates from "one step forward, one step back" (SFSB) through to entire "field to fork" (F2F) traceability. Traceability underpins information sharing in supply chains and characteristics of the data and the systems developed. The characteristics discussed in this article include visibility, transparency, and trust.