Internationally, there have been many moves in recent years to improve information flow in the food industry, in particular to achieve food traceability throughout the supply chain from the initial producer through to the consumer (“from the farm to the fork”). The main reason for this has been to improve food safety, since it has been clear from problems such as mad cow disease, dioxin adulteration and avian flu that the health of consumers has been compromised by a lack of effective traceability. However traceability is also seen as a way to reduce the costs to industry by containing the effects of any problem which arises and as a way to provide better information to consumers who have specific factors they want to consider when buying food products.

In addition to requiring traceability in order to detect the source of a problem and remove any affected products, food safety authorities have applied rules of sanitary standards which require strict controls and documentation. The integration of information about sanitary controls applied with other traceability information about particular products provides advance warning of possible problems and accelerates the speed of reaction to food safety incidents.