Fonterra intended to have all 140 of its processing plants on 50 sites in nine countries fully traceable electronically by 2020.
The target was totally visible product origin, history, composition, documentation and location from farmgate to customer or consumer, Kirk said.
The intention was that product information could be accessed in three hours rather than the three days it took in 2013 to trace the whey protein concentrate from Hautapu when botulism contamination was suspected.
Traceability was not new for the processing and marketing co-operative but had been a mix of electronic (think barcodes) and manual (manifests and spreadsheets) for at least the past decade.
Fonterra had now adopted the best-practice GS1 global traceability standard used by large supply chains.
It defined a minimum set of traceability requirements within business processes to achieve fully electronic supply-chain traceability.
“It ensures we will have a robust system for total electronic product traceability starting with milk collected from farms and spanning the entire supply chain from the manufacturing and packaging of goods to their storage and dispatch to customers,” Kirk said.
As well Fonterra was strengthening its systems to safeguard customers and consumers using product authentication, tamper-evident packaging and anti-counterfeiting technology.
From the consumer’s perspective, the placement of QR scan codes on Fonterra retail products from March next year would provide composition, food safety and provenance information via website.
Anmum infant formula sold in New Zealand would be the first product to feature such information because young mothers were a prime audience for such product background.
The code, which was unique for every can or carton of the product, would connect consumers via a mobile phone app to a webpage with information that verified the authenticity of the product and its batch number.
“New Zealanders are not big QR scanners compared with Asian countries but it is a great way of providing the full traceability assurances and product provenance our total electronic system will facilitate,” he said.
All Fonterra’s NZ and Australian-made products were already electronically traced from manufacturing sites to consumers, by way of bar codes.
The challenge ahead of Fonterra was to extend that capability across the seven other source countries and to extend it back down the supply chain to farm level, probably including milk fingerprinting in future.
By the end of this year 40% of plants globally would have traceability data electronically connected, a further 50% of the plants would be included by the end of 2017 and the remaining 10% would be completed in 2018-19.
Kirk believed that in future Fonterra would be able to display the “genealogy” of all products, both ingredients and consumer-ready products, on a computer screen as a histogram.
The identity of those dairy products would start with the milk going into tankers, along with milk from several neighbouring farms, graphically represented down to region, district and even GPS location.
For a composite product like infant formula, Fonterra also needed to add source information about ingredients like vitamins and minerals – when and where they were delivered into Fonterra’s network and then used in manufacture.
Consumer and food service chief operating officer Jacqueline Chow said the Trusted Goodness seal was effectively a promise to consumers that Fonterra knew exactly where each product was, what went into it and what it was used for.
“Today, as more products cross borders and consumers put more and more store in value of good nutrition, there is a growing demand for information about what goes into our food and for reassurance that it is produced with a great deal of care.
“Traceability provides consumers with reassurance.”
Kirk said he didn’t underestimate the size of the task that remained, especially considering the seven languages in which Fonterra operated around the world with nearly 2000 products.
“Often, components extracted from milk during the making of one product would be added to milk being turned into another product.
“So as well as tracing finished products, our total product traceability has to cover all the various component products we produce and either sell or use.”
Kirk said there wouldn’t be any new requirements put on milk supply farmers and that milk fingerprinting, announced by the Fonterra Research and Development Centre a year ago, would be incorporated in total traceability where and when appropriate.
