It is of obvious importance that we as a food-producing company are able to trace the origin of our product.
For many years now, W. van den Meer and Sons Ltd. Has had a tracing system as part of our quality management system according to the ISO22000 standard. This tracing system is automated, so tracking/tracing (a recall) of products is a matter of minutes. For every poultry farmer, we can check which customers have received products from this farmer, but we can also inform our customers from which poultry farmers the products they bought originate.
Similarly, with one push of a button, all the data are known that are maintained in a database per flock (supplier of feeds, breed of chicken, farming method, which driver has driven, process parameters, medical history, salmonella status, microbiological results of the end product, et cetera). By interlinking customers, products and flocks of chickens, data are instantly transparent. Because of its fast tracking and tracing, we have named our database TREES.
To be able to track and trace well, either the unique linking code of the unique pallet number (SSCC no.) must be known.
On every poly bag of packaged chicken there is a label, or we will print the flock code, so every chicken can be traced.
In the pictuere you can see a boiling-hen in poly bag with on it the flock code, the “frozen on date" and expiry date. In this example #10 is the flock number.
The combination of the flock code + frozen on date is the unique flock code.
For different packaging, our minimum traceable batch size is 1 box. On each side of a box a unique flock code and an expiry date have been printed. A product description and a box Ean barcode (Ean13) are also automatically printed on the side of the box. In some cases, this information can be found on the label on the box.
In this example, #012 is the flock code and 01-04-2017 is the expiry date. Submitting this unique flock code combination gives enough information to ‘trace’ flock data upstream and ‘track’ end products downstream.
In addition to the unique flock code the origins are printed/labelled on each chicken packaged in a poly bag. For example, the bag/box may be imprinted with
NL-NL or DE-NL or BE-NL
The first country code is for the country of farming (the poultry farmer) and the second country code is for the processor (W. van der Meer en Zonen B.V.).
Each pallet is provided with a pallet form with a unique pallet number. For each pallet, it is known as to which products from which poultry farmer are on that pallet. Submitting this pallet number also gives us information to ‘track’ the flock data upstream and ‘trace’ the end products downstream.
Box encoding:
In this example, 94553 is the unique pallet number (charge number).
This unique pallet number is part of the SSCC number (the last digits) that can be automatically scanned with the EAN128 barcode.
Submitting the unique pallet number offers sufficient information to ‘trace’ flock data upstream and ‘track’ end products downstream.
