Meat Traceability

Products and services >> Food Identification

Traceability throughout the food supply chain is a universal hot topic as governments react to consumer concerns over food quality and safety by introducing stricter regulation. From January, 2005 all companies within the EU, and those exporting to it, will have to meet tough new traceability rules.

DNA-based food traceability is one of the more cost-effective, precise and powerful ways to trace foods. DNA-based traceability is achieved without significant modification to existing meat processing practices and can be tailored to suit most business practices.

GENTRAS has developed its own meat traceability system, available at the moment for beef and poultry meat. It is designed to be more comprehensive, error-free, cheap and fast than any other system developed in the European market to now. The benefits of this system will be for the producers, for the meat processors, and for the retailers.

The system will allow producers to oversee the distribution of the product, ensuring that only meat from specified farms is sold under a specific brand, and in the case of a product recall, it will allow to rapidly and precisely identify the carcasses which are the source of the problem. It can also be used to differentiate a meat brand from those of competitors.

Meat processors can use the traceability system to help comply with EU labelling legislation, and to monitor and control the processing plants.

For retailers, it represents a powerful communications tool which can be used to reassure the consumers as to the safety and quality of your fresh produce, and to differentiate a meat brand from those of the competitors.
Technologically, the traceability system developed at GENTRAS will be based on the combination of strain/variety identification by STR typing using in house-selected STRs, and of an approach originally developed by GENTRAS called extrinsic DNA barcoding.