The Italian perspective of traceability

“Traceability” is recognized as the modern keyword of the food and agricultural scenario, a suitable answer to ever increasing customer’s food safety requirements, as well as a viable tool for responsibility sharing among food supply chain partners. Recent food emergencies and current debates on food products origin are drawing increasing attention on products traceability. However, traceability should be right considered as a competitive leverage, which allows improved rationalization of logistics and manufacturing activities, as well as valorization of high quality food products. To this extent, by exploiting properly defined traceability systems, companies can achieve processes optimization, thanks to information available and transferred by the system itself; the ultimate result of such optimization can be found in higher competitiveness of the whole food supply chain. This paper illustrates the main characteristics of traceability systems, when adopted as risk management tools. In particular, from the safety point of view, it is emphasized how traceability systems may allow decreasing magnitude of safety risks outcomes. Such tools are compared to traceability systems conceived as operational and management tools for logistics processes optimization. To this extent, the paper shows how traceability may become a competitive leverage for companies, allowing processes optimization in terms of better accuracy, improved inventory visibility and higher labor efficiency. The whole analysis is particularly focused on the Italian perspective, and grounded on recent Italian law regulations.