Salt Lake City, Utah-based ReposiTrak has welcomed South Carolina-based Haven Foods to its traceability network.
Joining the network will enable Haven Foods to exchange traceability information from feed to store between its fresh and frozen seafood suppliers and producers and its retail and restaurant clients across the world. This will help it meet and exceed the Food and Drug Administration’s recently finalized Food Safety Modernization Act Section 204 rule on traceability.
“Beyond the immediate need to comply with FSMA 204, Haven Foods came to us with an objective to make full, end-to-end traceability a part of its everyday operation and a true understanding of the inherent good that comes with it, including better and simpler transparency for its suppliers and customers and more efficient use of resources,” said Randy Fields, ReposiTrak chairman and CEO. “As Haven Foods has grown, so have the number of forms and systems it was using to collect traceability information, which would have made FSMA 204 compliance next to impossible.”
While many of Haven Foods’ suppliers were sending traceability information to the company, there were inconsistencies in the formatting and level of detail provided. Suppliers, ranging from open-ocean fisheries in South America to farms in Asia, adhere to the recordkeeping standards of their country and sometimes down to regional or local levels.
Data was sent to Haven Foods in spreadsheets, in the body of an email or contained in an attachment. The trouble came with extracting data and organizing it in a way that allowed Haven Foods to share it with customers and use it for business insights.
“Transparency is just as important to our company as our work in sourcing safe, high-quality and sustainable seafood. It’s part of our brand that can only be made possible through true, end-to-end traceability,” said Nicholas Leonard, Haven Foods co-founder.
“So many of our products are included on the FSMA 204 Food Traceability List, and we recognize that international suppliers might not know and understand the FDA requirements like we do. They may use different systems and the information available varies, but the ReposiTrak Traceability Network synchronizes what they send in any format and makes it useable and accessible, at a cost that doesn’t impact margin.”
The FDA published the FSMA 204 regulation in November, requiring companies that manufacture, process, pack or hold foods on the food traceability list to establish and maintain key data element records for specific critical tracking events in a product’s journey through the supply chain. As that product changes hands or changes form, a compounding string of data must be transferred between trading partners to provide full, end-to-end traceability.
The FTL products sourced and distributed by Haven Foods include finfish species like tuna and tilapia and crustacean species like shrimp and crab. Other examples of FTL categories are tomatoes, deli salads, nut butters and leafy greens, each comprised of thousands of SKUs.
