TRACEABILTY AS A FOUNDATION
Traceability, the fundamental “glue” for building sustainable supply chains
Traceability: a crucial aspect of food and agriculture supply chains. Everything from ensuring product safety to enabling product recalls depends on assured traceability.
The benefits of traceability are many and varied, including greater efficiency, higher quality products, complying with and potentially staying ahead of legislation and of course, improving sustainability.
Sustainability professionals need to be able to prove a product’s provenance and to track it through the supply chain. Traceability is “the glue that holds everything together”. All the different sustainability topics – from deforestation to labour rights – depend on effective traceability. A sustainable supply chain is impossible without traceability.
In the food and agriculture sector, it’s time-consuming and difficult to collect all the data and insights for reporting, often because there are various sustainability professionals working across the business on their own topic, in silos, with no management system to bring everything together. TRACT changes that. Now it’s possible to aggregate all the data in a single platform and visualise the entire supply chain from farmer to retailer. The technology allows us to understand, in detail, how a commodity moves through your supply chain. To date, this has been a challenge for every supplier. But now we can create a traceability visualisation tool with the credibility to give the buyer the confidence so that they know where the commodity has come from and the path it has taken.
A neutral and non-judgemental platform
Supply chain certifications (such as from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, Rainforest Alliance and so on) are uploaded onto the platform. TRACT is a neutral platform – it is agnostic about the certification type - but it shows what has been certified and what has not. That information can be shared between the supplier and the buyer so they can each see clearly what exists and where there are gaps.
There’s no naming and shaming with traceability data. Anyone who uses the platform can share information, regardless of where they are with their sustainability and traceability journey. No one’s data will be shared, unless they choose it to be.
How does traceability work on TRACT?
The platform does not trace a product for users. We align on how everyone reports on traceability. For the traceability Technical Working Group (TWG), we use subject matter experts from the supplier and the brand sides, and we start by researching all the traceability requirements and data. We always start with what exists, for example, we look at certification schemes, including third party schemes as well as in-house certification schemes; we load all the traceability data on the platform.
TRACT will ease the work for the suppliers and also for sustainability managers at producers and brands, who often spend a lot of time chasing these reports and allow them to spend more of their time improving efficiencies and sustainability performance.
How TRACT would work for a Head of Sustainability
Generally, the Head of Sustainability has a number of different topics to manage such as deforestation, labour rights, carbon emissions and so on. They will also have different commodities to manage too, such as palm oil, soya, cocoa…each of which will have different supply chains. Collecting, verifying and understanding all the data often takes up the majority of their time, which means that time spent actually making an impact gets squeezed. And this is the big challenge for them. Now, we have the structure and systems in place to measure, manage and make strategic decisions. Looking a few years down the line, we can see a much brighter future: with low carbon supply chains, farmers being lifted out of poverty, perhaps an end to deforestation and child labour. This is the world that we would all like to work towards.