Global scan of technologies and systems enabling data capture and transfer across red meat supply chains

Summary

Food provenance and integrity are paramount to protecting markets and consumers. Systems that provide complete traceability throughout the red meat supply chain underpin provenance and are pivotal in the context of food safety, biosecurity and attributing product authenticity, qualities and features.

This project reviewed best practice systems and technologies from agricultural and non-agricultural sectors that enable data capture and transfer across global red meat supply chains.

The recommendations will inform further development of Integrity Systems 2025 implementation plans and future investment decisions relevant to data capture and traceability systems for the Australian red meat industry.

Objectives

The primary objectives of this project were to:

• describe and review relevant and best practice systems and technologies from agricultural and non-agricultural sectors to enable traceability throughout red meat supply chains
• provide recommendations and advice to Integrity Systems Company (ISC) to inform future investment decisions relevant to data capture and traceability systems for the red meat sector in Australia.

Key findings

The project report provides a global scan of the technologies and systems that underpin supply chain traceability, giving recommendations to ISC to inform future directions. It identified that the technologies and systems fall into two key categories:

• the digital architecture that tracks or traces products as they move along the supply chain
• the technologies that verify the product is indeed what is claimed, which can then split into two sub-categories:
  • those that test the product to verify
  • those that identify the product to enable verification.

The evaluation of the technology clusters within each of categories has identified high-rating opportunities for the Australia sector that are worthy of further investigation. Importantly, it also highlights that a single supply chain solution does not currently exist, rather, there are several solutions at each of the major supply chain stages.

Benefits to industry

This project has provided a global scan of the technologies and systems that underpin supply chain traceability, which will inform future directions for ISC. Supply chain participants can also use the report as a resource to identify what technologies are currently available on the market.

MLA action

Recommendations and findings are being fed into ISC's horizon two and three investment plans to improve the red meat integrity systems.

Future research

• Define the overarching architecture of a complete end-to-end traceability system for 2025 and beyond.
• Harmonisation of regulations and clarification of roles and responsibilities in an enhanced traceability system at an industry (red meat) or sector (agriculture) level.
• Facilitate the extension of the red meat integrity system from whole-of-life to whole-of-supply chain through evaluation of technologies that facilitate individual animal traceability to the consumer.
• Assess the potential for advances in key foundational technologies to alter the technological landscape by changing what is possible in supply chain traceability.