Reengineering food traceability systems

The credibility of the food industry is often undermined by the recurrent food safety incidents around the world. Beyond the physical level, considerable economic burden results from these crises in terms of healthcare use, lost sales, and food recalls. Customers, nowadays, not only ask for quality but also authenticity and transparency of food labelling information. Therefore, traceability has been embedded as a mandatory requirement in policies and legislations. Traceability is an information management technique that entails data recording and communication about a food product as it moves through the supply chain. Although manual paper-based traceability systems are still visible, food operators are widely adopting computerised traceability systems where automatic identification and sensor technologies are utilised. Despite the use of emergent technologies, costly food incidents caused by inefficient traceability systems are still prevalent around the globe, which is a result of information loss in the traceability systems either within a supply chain operator or between the links. Well-organized approaches to enhance information flow and reduce information loss in traceability systems are still not adequately present in the literature. To fill up this gap, this research develops and applies tools and techniques that will support food supply chain operators to systematically reengineer their traceability systems so that they can minimise the information loss and improve supply chain efficiency. Four contributions have been made as follows: 1) constructing a generic theoretical framework of food traceability; 2) proposing a novel material and information flow modelling technique; 3) building a methodology for selecting the most favourable traceability technologies and; 4) developing an information loss analysis technique to apply in a specific case study of Bangladeshi export shrimp supply chain. This research, enabling coherent understanding, collaborative design, optimum technology planning, and evaluation of the information loss risks, offers systematic approaches in reengineering food traceability systems.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Islam, Samantha

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Cullen, Jonathan M

• Food supply chain
• Information technology
• Traceability
• System reengineering

Licence

• https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.86776

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/339366