Transaction and Traceability Guidelines

Product traceability can be challenging in the global marketplace, and efforts such as the Produce Traceability Initiative have made huge strides in development of standards and processes at a large commercial scale. In contrast, processes and norms are traceability in local and regional food systems are still nascent. To support development of standard traceability practices the project collaborative distilled the most fundamental aspects of traceability practices utilized in mainstream supply chains and adapted them for relevance to local food system stakeholders. The fundamentals of traceability fall into two categories 1) information about the market transaction and 2) specific product traceability. 

Information about the market transaction is created and included on an invoice at the time of sale by the product seller, which may be either a farmer/producer or hub/consolidator. Information about the market transaction includes: an invoice ID, quantity of product being sold, price per unit, and the total price for the quantity of each product being sold.  

In addition to basic market transaction information, traceability information must be captured for each product. For traceability purposes the user must include the name of the producer/farm, the physical address where the product was produced, the county of production, and product lot codes. Importantly, the inclusion of county information alongside the production address is intended to make it easier for local food purchasing programs to determine if product meets their definition of local without having to manually search addresses to determine production location.

Users may also choose to include a Supplier ID, or Digital ID, to identify the producer or business selling the product. Supplier IDs are unique identifiers that maintain visibility of the supplier’s identity at every step of the supply chain. They are often utilized by aggregators or re-sellers to ensure traceability back to the point of production. Thus, a food hub may want to issue Digital IDs to contributing farms, as this information is then included in any Lot codes for products they repack.

The Market Data Guidelines for Produce in Regional Food Systems were developed through a collaboration among USDA AMS Local and Regional Food Systems, Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment, and the International Center for Food Ontology Operability Data and Semantics. Funding was provided through USDA AMS Cooperative agreement #22-TMMSD-ME-0002