Tractability

Tractability 

Food businesses must be able to trace foods, animal feed or any substance that is intended to be part of a food or feed throughout all the stages of production, processing, and distribution. This is to ensure that food businesses do not supply unsafe products to the market. Food businesses must have written systems and procedures in place to identify all businesses to which they have supplied products or received products from,  and be able to operate internal traceable systems to identify, isolate and correct food safety problems as quickly as possible.

All food products placed in the market must be adequately labelled or identified to enable full tractability. Food businesses have a legal duty to withdraw products from the market that they identify as unsafe and carry out a full recall of these products. The food business must also inform the relevant competent authority, for example the local environmental health authority or the Food Standards Agency, as soon as it has identified unsafe food products.

In 2005 Sudan 1, an illegal and potentially carcinogenic red dye, identified in a consignment of crosses and Blackwell Worcester sauce made by a UK manufacture resulted in a mass recall in the UK food chain. The product was used both as a table sauce and as a food ingredient. All affected food products were withdrawn from the market. The cost to the food industry was millions of pounds, although other EU countries did not institute a recall as they thought the risk to be insignificant.