Traceability, like inspection, audits and training are often held up as magic bullets but can’t really stop outbreaks from happening alone. Being able to trace a product is wholly reactive. While it is part of a good food safety culture, can help with market differentiation and allows investigators to find the source of a problem (something to learn from for next time), a good traceability program doesn’t raw poop or vomit off of foods.

Joan Tupponce of the Richmond Times-Dispatch writes that the PCA-linked Salmonella outbreak could have been avoided if someone had a good traceability system in place. Who would that someone be? Many buyers knew about the reported conditions at PCA and refused to   What would good tracking have done to reduce the illnesses that were happening well before epidemiologists were able to link them to peanut products? Traceability may have reduced the recall impacts, but I’m not sure how it would have limited the exposure of the 700 individuals.

[David] Rosenthal  started ConcernTrak LLC in 2010 to provide food-safety technology solutions, which include an online, subscription-based food traceability service. The Chesterfield County-based company also performs food-safety audits of domestic and overseas facilities.

"We became food-safety crusaders," he said. "We saw the concept of food safety and traceability as a reactive process. Our concept is to be proactive, to have more information on food suppliers so we can identify potential contamination before it reaches the consumer level."
Rosenthal began voicing his concern for food safety in June 2008 when he urged the nut industry to be aware of biological contamination such as salmonella affecting food products.
Six months later, a nationwide salmonella outbreak took place involving peanuts from Lynchburg-based Peanut Corp. of America. The outbreak sickened about 700 people, has been linked to at least nine deaths, and led to one of the largest product recalls in U.S. history.
Donna Rosenbaum, CEO of Food Safety Partners, a Chicago food-safety consulting firm, said the outbreak could have been avoided with a system like ConcernTrak.
ConcernTrak "has the capability of putting a lot of information at your fingertips," she said. "The solution ConcernTrak provides is prevention."

I’m interested to see more from ConcernTrak on how their crusading system sniffs out pathogen contamination.