About Traceability & Recall
With growing concerns from consumers about product & food safety and increasing regulations, manufacturers & retailers today need to be able to know the origin of the products they produce and sell. In the event of a recall or withdrawal, they need to respond in a timely and effective manner. In this context, it is critical that traceability systems can identify the source of all raw materials and the destination of all finished products.
But traceability can only be achieved successfully if it is built upon global standards that can act as the foundation for clear, understandable exchanges for everyone involved.
GS1 Global Traceability Standard: a single traceability process to meet all quality and regulatory requirements
The GS1 Global Traceability standard can help provide a single traceability process to comply with all quality and regulatory requirements. It ensures interoperability with trading partners, allowing for efficient recall or tracing of raw materials origin from upstream suppliers. It is a business process standard describing the traceability process independently from the choice of enabling technologies. It defines minimum requirements for companies of all sizes across industry sectors and corresponding GS1 Standards used within information management tools.
The GS1 Global Traceability Standard (GTS) makes traceability systems possible on a global scale, for both small and large organisations, all along the supply chain, no matter how many companies are involved, no matter what enabling technologies (barcodes, RFID, EDI, Internet...) are chosen. Have a look at our Global Traceability Standard webpage for more information.
The GS1 Global Traceability Programme: helping companies implement Traceability
Companies that manufacture consumer products invest considerable resources to establish the value of their brands and meet the demands of their partners, their customers and local regulators. GS1 has developed the Global Traceability Programme to support their efforts. The Global Traceability Programme helps companies to implement traceability according to best practice and GS1 global standards. Companies can verify the quality and integrity of their existing traceability processes using the GS1 Traceability Checklist. Have a look at our Global Traceability Programme webpage for more information.
The GS1 Product Recall Standard: enabling effective recalls
The GS1 Product Recall standard enables an effective automated notification system in the case of recalls and withdrawals. This standard serves as a common-sense blueprint enabling all supply chain stakeholders to implement more effective and timely product recall processes and notifications.
Get involved - Join our Traceability working group: the Traceability and Event Sharing Standards Maintenance Group (SMG)
This Standards Maintenance Group consists of traceability and EPC experts across multi-sectors working collaboratively to update and maintain the GS1 EPCglobal standards that support physical event capture and sharing, the Global Traceability Standard that supports tracking and tracing of goods and information about the goods and the Global Traceability Checklist that identifies gaps in the traceability system, supporting traceability implementation. This includes all simple work requests indicated as impacting the event data sharing and traceability standards. The complete standards supported by this Standards Maintenance Group are listed in the latest version of the Global Standards Management Process (GSMP) Standards Assignment Map.
Process Manager: Michael Sarachman (Michael.Sarachman@gs1.org)
