Traceability Initiative

mpXML developed a Meat and Poultry Traceability Implementation Guide as a consistent approach to traceability across all fresh food supply chains in June 2010. This guide was produced for US suppliers, wholesalers, and retailers, and provides minimum standards and best practices for managing product traceability at the shipment, pallet, case and consumer level.
 
Representatives from all major meat and poultry supplier trade associations and GS1 US participated in the development of the guide to capture a broad set of industry expertise.  Contributors were: the American Meat Institute, Butterball, LLC, Costco Wholesale Corporation, Farmland Foods, GS1 US, iTradeNetwork, Inc., Meat Solutions LLC, mpXML, USDA, National Turkey Federation, Perdue Farms, Safeway, Inc., Smithfield Foods, Supervalu, Inc., Topco Associates LLC, Tyson Foods, UFPC, Walmart, and Wegmans Foods Markets.

CALL TO ACTION: Meat and Poultry Traceability Guide for North America

mpXML is now cooperating with GS1 US, GS1 Canada, and GS1 Mexico to create a workgroup that will revise the current mpXML Traceability for Meat and Poultry - US Implementation Guideline to accommodate all North American countries – US, Canada and Mexico. 

The primary objectives of the Workgroup are to:

• Review, revise and reissue the existing mpXML Traceability Guideline, dated June 2010, in a more global context.  Factors relevant to product traceability include product identification, product labeling, use of barcodes, human readable information, data capture as a function of product movement or transformation, electronic commerce, and recordkeeping requirements.

• Identify content to be revised or developed to handle Canada and Mexico traceability requirements, including local regulations and trade practices.

• Establish minimum requirements and best practices to share information between trading partners.

• Identify Critical Tracking Event data elements across the supply chain that are used to support product traceability.

• Enable the document content to continue to be expanded to handle additional countries, and possibly eventually accommodate global meat and poultry traceability as a compendium of documents encompassing individual country-specific requirements.  As such, it is expected that global agreement would only be needed on the core global section which would focus on common processes and data.

Individuals interested in participating in the initiative and having access to the Workgroup Community Room should send the following information by email to Steve Rosenberg at srosenberg@gs1us.org,

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