Food Control 16 (2005) 481486

www.elsevier.com/locate/foodcont

Food safety and transparency in food chains and networks

Relationships and challenges
Adrie J.M. Beulens
a

a,*

, Douwe-Frits Broens

b,1

, Peter Folstar c, Gert Jan Hofstede

Department of Social Sciences, Information Technology Group, Wageningen University, Dreijenplein 2, Wageningen 6703 HB, The Netherlands
b
KLICT, Applied research programme on Transparency in Food Chains, P.O. Box 3060, s-Hertogenbosch 5203 DB, The Netherlands
c
Nationaal Regie-Orgaan Genomics (Netherlands Genomics Initiative) and Wageningen University, P.O. Box 93035, The Hague 2509 AA,
The Netherlands
Department of Social Sciences, Information Technology Group, Wageningen University, Dreijenplein 2, Wageningen 6703 HB, The Netherlands
Received 31 July 2003; received in revised form 11 October 2003; accepted 13 October 2003

Abstract
European consumers are worried about the safety of their food. These concerns are caused by a continuing sequence of food
scandals and incidents during the last decade. In response, consumers call for high quality food, food integrity, safety guarantees
and transparency. Governments are imposing new legislation. Retailers are imposing new demands on their supply chains. Food
supply chains react by implementing systems to improve the products quality and guarantee its safety, at the same time making
transparent that they do so. Such actions can be taken at the level of either the individual company or the complete network of
supply chains. We describe the challenges involved in achieving food safety and transparency by cooperating in the supply chain
network. To this end, we elaborate on a real world case in an SME environment.

2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Food safety; Food supply chains; Transparency

1. Food quality as a driver for change

Food safety is currently considered to be an important issue for all stakeholders in food production.
Consumers and other stakeholders are increasingly
concerned about the continuing sequence of food scandals and incidents (extensively described by Van Dorp,
2004). These scandals often obtain wide coverage in the
news media and in professional publications. As a result,
consumers are familiar with BSE, dioxin, FMD, MPA,
Nitrofen, and other contaminants that were found wide
spread in food products due to errors in production
processes and or associated with the use of contaminated raw materials or production means. Due to poor
hygiene in institutional kitchens, catering and private
households, there is an upward trend of reported food
incidents involving salmonella, campylobacter and E.
coli 0157:H7.

Corresponding author.
E-mail address: d.f.broens@hccnet.nl (D.-F. Broens).
1
Fax: +31-73-5229850.
0956-7135/$ - see front matter
2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.foodcont.2003.10.010

Consumer perceptions thus show an increasing concern about food safety and about properties of the
food they buy and eat. Although much information is
available as a result of labelling conventions, this
does not always translate into more condence. It is
of great importance to the food industry to protect
brands in order to restore and maintain consumer condence. It has been recognised that there is an increasing
need for transparent information on the quality of
the entire food chain, supported by modern tracking
and tracing methods (Trienekens & Beulens, 2001).
High quality food, integrity and associated services
and information should be guaranteed. Consumers call
for food that can be fully trusted, they ask for safety
guarantees and information with integrity to conrm
their trust. (Integrity of information is dened as
the information provided is in conformance with the
reality it depicts.) This call is voiced in particular by
retailers who state requirements to be met by their
suppliers, and is further enhanced by NGOs and legislators.
The EU is preparing new policies, regulations and
laws, in particular the General Food Law (GFL). The

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A.J.M. Beulens et al. / Food Control 16 (2005) 481486

latter law will be eective as of January 2005. A recent

overview of current legislation and standards is given by
Van Plaggenhoef, Batterink, and Trienekens (2003).
Over the past decade, quality assurance has become a
cornerstone of food safety policy in the food industry.
Much focus has been on integral quality management
systems. These systems include all steps in food production chains such as supply of raw materials, food
manufacturing, packaging, transportation and logistics,
research and development, maintenance of production
equipment and training and education of sta. Increasingly, food quality is associated with a proactive policy
and the creation of requirements to maintain safe food
supply (Folstar, 2001).
In 1993 the FAO-WHO Codex Alimentarius Committee has recommended HACCP as the most eective
system to maintain assurance of safe food supply.
Increasingly, quality assurance systems are supported by
quick and specic methods of analysis largely due to
progress in molecular biology (DNA-methods) as well
as in information technology. Coupling laboratory
information systems to production and management
information systems creates eective networks for
quality assurance in food chains. It is expected that increase of knowledge of quality determining factors in
food chains will lead to improvement of assurance and
maintenance as well as to more sustainable systems; it
has been suggested that industrial food supply has never
been safer before (Karel, 2000).

2. Reactions by the business community

The business community in the food supply chain
regards the call for safety from their customers, consumers, government and other stakeholders as important driving forces for continuous innovation. These
innovations focus on implementing systems to improve
the products quality and to guarantee its safety, at the
same time making transparent that they do so on the
level of the supply chain.
Businesses take such actions both at the level of the
individual company, the level of individual (closed)
chains of cooperating companies and the level of open
networks of connected supply chains (referred to as
supply chain networks or SCN). Especially the requirement of traceability forces companies to cooperate on
SCN level, and to set standards and procedures. In turn,
provisions such as tracking and tracing systems oer new
business opportunities (Hofstede, 2003), for instance
since they:
enable logistics and process improvements along the
chain,
have important consequences as to liability (insurance companies).

More specically, the above-mentioned food safety

concerns have lead (chains of) companies to react by a
combination of the following actions:
1. they extend their assortment by products and brands
that are associated with safety and quality,
2. they claim their integrity with respect to food safety
and quality in communication to stakeholders such
as consumers and government bodies,
3. they formally register their performance, in order to
underpin their integrity claims,
4. they establish both organisational and technical systems to communicate internally and mutually about
their quality performance, in order to improve it
(quality control systems, tracking and tracing systems).
Certication systems are well known manifestations
generally involving all four levels of action (ISO9000,
HACCP, BRC, etc.; see Van Plaggenhoef et al., 2003).
The last three actions identied involve external
communication about safety-related issues. (Chains of)
companies seek to be transparent on safety issues. In our
research projects we have thus far learned that there is
no shared denition and understanding of transparency.
We found a variety of dictionary items and, in projects,
operational denitions from dierent perspectives.
Important and well-known perspectives are then the
logistics perspective focussing on the whereabouts of
products and associated properties at all times and the
quality perspective where the product and its quality
attributes are prevalent. Hofstede (2002) proposes the
following generic denition of transparency.
Denition. Transparency of a supply chain network is
the extent to which all the networks stakeholders have a
shared understanding of, and access to, product and
process related information that they request, without
loss, noise, delay and distortion.
If we look at the list of actions just mentioned the
question arises as how to design and realize the necessary organizational, information and technical systems
required for quality improvement, quality guarantees,
certication, reporting and transparency. In that context
it is worthwhile to look at the following aspects:
Functionality to be realized: If one aims at guaranteed food safety and specied high product quality
in combination with cost eectiveness and eciency
one has to provide business functions to:
 Design and Generate that quality and guarantees.
 Optimize business processes, in particular logistic
processes and recall processes that are necessary
in case of calamity. This optimization is often the
motor nancially driving tracking and tracing pro-

A.J.M. Beulens et al. / Food Control 16 (2005) 481486

jects (see Guis, 2003). It is assumed that the combination of better governance structures, models
and associated information obtained via the actual
use of better communication will result in better
decisions.
 Provide the information required by stakeholders
in- and outside the SCN.
 Satisfy Reporting requirements imposed by rules
and regulations.
The transparent information needed to achieve the
functionality just mentioned. It incorporates the mutual provision of useful data through the infrastructure by partners in the system, in accordance with
the denition given above.
Infrastructure and connectivity. In turn the transparent information provision necessitates a connected
communication infrastructure. It consists amongst
others of a hardware Infrastructure enabling communication for all actors involved (e.g. Internet),
software infrastructure that provide access to infrastructure resources, shared reference models that describe the syntax and semantics of data used, and of
messages and codes used (identication, coding and
message standards) and nally shared databases
based on these standards. Finally an SCN infrastructure needs to be connected to the enterprise systems
of the actors involved.
The three levels cannot be addressed separately.
Transparency is a necessary but not sucient condition
for functionality. Connectivity is a necessary but not
sucient condition for transparency.
We elaborate further on challenges that are facing
those who seek to achieve food safety and transparency
by cooperating on the level of the supply chain network.
To this end, we rst describe a project which we carried
out in an SME environment.

In 2000 a group of small and medium sized enterprises in the poultry egg industry (see Fig. 1) joined
forces in a combination of horizontal and vertical
partnerships. The resulting network involved all kinds of
parties in the industry from breeding farms down to the

Feed producer

Nursery

Hen farm

Packing station

Veterinarian
Product Board

Fig. 1. Description of the poultry egg chain.

packing stations, along with feed producers, veterinarians and a quality service organization. The objective of
this partnership was to guarantee the quality of their
products to the consumer and to provide information
for associated transparency. As a starting point, a study
was started in a public-private partnership together with
two universities and a research-funding agency.
In the last decades, the egg industry was aicted by
contaminations of salmonella, E. coli and recently of
dioxin. In this light, the project aimed at acquiring and
ensuring a license to produce for the future. At the
outset of the project, the network was already subject to
many dierent guidelines:
BRC/Eurepgap quality certication systems enforced
by European retailers,
MBT/KKM/SQF sector specic control certicate for
enterprises,
IKB/SKOVAR sector specic control certicate for
products (consumer certicate),
HACCP codex principles to assure food safety,
INK/EFQM dierent quality system models,
ISO 9000 organizational quality,
ISO 4001 environment control.
Some of the companies had successfully developed
branding strategies and according systems, aiming at a
distinguished quality perception by the client. Each of
the systems puts dierent requirements on the process,
the registration and communication by the companies.
For the SME partnership a continued license to
produce was expected to follow from guaranteed quality
and associated transparency to the consumer. Such
transparency would only be feasible if the autonomy of
the partners involved would be preserved and their
individual interests would be safeguarded. To meet these
objectives, the partnership has aimed at:
shared quality standards,
shared information infrastructure.

3. Case study: a license to produce eggs

Hatchery

483

Clients :
wholesale,
retail,
food service,
consumer

As a part of the study project, all partners ocially

laid down their intentions, and signed a Memorandum
of Understanding and Principles.
The partnership discussed four dierent scenarios
for cooperation, which dier along two dimensions (see
Fig. 2):
structural or incidental feedback,
control measures focusing either on the product or on
the production process.
The companies showed a slight preference for scenario 1, but even a stronger preference for scenario 3.
The companies agreed to proceed in a stepwise manner
indicated in the scheme. Whereas Fig. 2 describes

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A.J.M. Beulens et al. / Food Control 16 (2005) 481486

Recall management

Structural innovation

Incidental recalls of
products

Product development

Calamity control
Incidental adjustment of
production process

registration of data on clients and orders supporting

ecient recalls.

w.r.t. safety & quality

Structural
quality improvement

Stuctural adjustment of
production process

Fig. 2. Four scenarios for cooperation on food safety in chains.

scenarios on the functional level, the stepwise approach

was to assure that both connectivity and transparency
are built in a concentric fashion. Notice that along the
steps, the focus shifts from reactive to proactive management.
Transparency requirements were analyzed based on
the functional scenarios. Information was laid down, at
dierent moments in the chain, with respect to feed,
hens, eggs and medicines. Traceability in the chain appeared to be hampered by diering denitions
throughout the chain, a mismatch between administrative and physical units, a lack of registration and communication protocols, a lack of information status
verication possibilities and a lack of communication of
quality information at all. Initially, traceability proved
only possible on the administrative level of orders, not
on physical units.
To establish the appropriate connectivity to support
mere traceability (scenario 1) or full tracking and tracing
(scenarios 2 and 3), an information reference model has
been developed, as well as a prototype design of a
database for registration purposes on farm level. The
information reference model was linked to the logistic
real world describing the transition of both physical
units (products, batches, shipments) and administrative
units (orders) through the chain. The database was designed to support traceability both up- and downstream
starting from batches of hens.
As a result of the study, the partnership was recommended to introduce:
coding standards for all entities with a well-dened
syntax and shared semantics,
functional integration of the tracking and tracing system with company specic installed base:
 administrative systems,
 quality systems,
 process automation system,
automated printing and reading of product labels and
registration and identication of units,
automated generation of formal reports to public
stakeholders,
process optimization based on the database,
an independent third party controlling the systems
integrity,

The steps to be taken next were identied as deriving

the information needs of the partners, with the information model as a reference model, either selecting and
customising existing tracking and tracing software or
developing new software for the purpose and designing
an ecient information infrastructure along the abovementioned lines.
During the case study, it appeared that organisational
and even psychological considerations posed severe
threats to the establishment of transparency on SCNlevel:
the risk of unauthorized use of information,
the cost allocation and rules of compensation in case
of calamities,
uncertainty about the realization of additional prots
resulting from to the project,
uncertainty about resulting production cost savings,
loss of independence.
Generalisation of these ndings is subject of current
research.
Reviewing the process of the project, that is, the
process of shaping the partnership as regards its content,
and establishing support for our recommendations, we
encountered many problems. The next ve points appeared crucial to reach the cooperation we sought for:
1. Operational t: between incumbent information systems of individual participants.
2. Internal communication: e.g. by means of frequent
gatherings to share important information.
3. Trust: being open and clear about expectations,
objectives, actions, responsibilities and roles,
4. Transparency within the project: availability of the
information necessary to the project at the right time
and in the right way.
5. Result-orientation: committing and applying to measuring results.
6. Depart from the physical and administrative process:
application of a logistic information reference model
appeared to be promising.
In this way, over time the egg project evolved from a
negative approach: facing threats and ensuring business,
into a positive one: improving quality and facilitating
innovations. Mutual trust developed and objectives
changed into more challenging and comprehensive ones,
both in the particular group of companies involved and
in the surrounding industry. Shared insights and objectives that were regarded non-competitive within the
group, were found to be important to distinguish this
group from competitors in the egg industry.

A.J.M. Beulens et al. / Food Control 16 (2005) 481486

To sum up, the project delivered at an organisational

level:
1. a shared insight that delivering a guaranteed quality
and associated transparency to the client and the consumer requires a SCN approach,
2. shared condence that such SCNs can be implemented and maintained,
3. shared objectives and constraints, i.e. autonomy of
the participants and safeguards with respect to information access and use,
4. a formal Memorandum of Understanding, Principles
and Co-operation as a guidance for co-operation,
and at a systems level:
5. a framework for a shared information infrastructure
that is able to interface with information systems of
partners involved while satisfying access and usage
restrictions,
6. a prototype tracking and tracing system.
In the words of the participants, the project proves
the feasibility of a SCN partnership of SMEs in a virtual
co-operation while preserving their autonomy to a large
extent. They appear to be able to make the step from a
pure market oriented approach towards a SCN approach without disturbing the precarious power balance
between these SMEs.

4. Context and conclusions

The described project is quite exceptional in its governance structure. It involves SMEs who together develop and mutually enforce standards. Although
balloting is rigorous, the system is open to any company
volunteering to adopt the rules of the game. Apparently,
the initiative is not aimed at developing or ensuring
brand value at the cost of competitors, but to distinguish
outstanding quality.
Whereas the poultry example directly applied safety
related functionality (see Fig. 2) other successful examples are knownfor instance in the fresh fruit chain
from South Africa to Europe (Guis, 2003)where logistic eciency and reliability was the rst driver to
establish connectivity and transparency in the chain.
Building on the established systems, tracking and tracing for quality and safety are then a next step.
Most initiatives aiming at generating a license to
produce explicitly aim at brand value. In these cases,
although the resulting system may look similar, the
organisation is drastically dierent. The powerful brand
owner, mostly a large production or retail company,
initiates and enforces transparency in its supply chain.
It organises a so-called closed supply chain environment, having its own information infrastructure, quality system and approach. These are made to t with the

485

brand characteristics. Suppliers must abide to these

prescriptions or else are expelled from the brand
owners exclusive supplier list. Examples are known of
retailers oering a direct connection between farmer
and consumer, who both have to enlist to the system
against a certain fee. Examples of such closed systems
which are related to the egg industry in the Netherlands
are:
the Nutrace system (www.nutreco.nl), developed by
feed producer and pork supply chain player Nutreco
the Poultrace HYPERLINK system, developed by
Plukon, producer of fresh and frozen poultry meat
and brand owner of Friki (www.friki.com).
It appears that transparency is a crucial factor in
both establishing food safety and customer trust.
Yet, transparency only recently came up as an
interdisciplinary research subject. The case study
described shows that elements from economics, organisational and social sciences are at least as
important as the legal and technological questions
traditionally connected to the subject. Still, even
on legal and technical level many questions appear
to be unanswered.
Any approach to realise food safety by furthering
transparency in food chains or supply chain networks
will meet open questions. Using the tripartite categorisation introduced earlier and borrowing from Hofstede
(2002) we mention some of them:
Functionality:
Does transparency aect pricing?
What economic benets can transparency deliver for
stakeholders, at what costs?
Can transparency enable new forms of risk management?
Can transparency be used for economic and environmental policy making ?
What chain optimization is feasible?
Transparency:
How does transparency t with various legal systems,
especially in an international context?
How do laws, for instance on liability, or institutional
characteristics, such as contract forms, enable or impede transparency?
Is transparency restricted by technical process characteristics?
Do perceptions and attitudes as to transparency dier
across cultures and borders?
How is transparency related to trust, both of business
partners and of consumers?
Does transparency ask for new functions and roles in
supply chain networks?
How to measure transparency?

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A.J.M. Beulens et al. / Food Control 16 (2005) 481486

What are organizational controls to establish transparency?

Connectivity:
How to make information technically available
(architecture, sensors, data inputs)?
What reference information models are needed?
How to reconcile various information models, if
working in a supply chain network?
What delivery platforms are possible and why?
The development of in-company safety systems has
reached sophisticated levels, companies are well
able to guarantee the safety of their product between their front and back door. However, to regain consumer trust and establish overall food
safety a chain approach is necessary, forcing companies to cooperate in closed chains or supply chain
networks. Until now we have only seen the rst
steps on this road but the sense of urgency is high
and practice is moving quickly. The most imminent
challenges lie in establishing transparency rather
than infrastructures. Our example proves that a
cooperative approach in supply chain networks is
not trivial, yet feasible.
5. Summary
In this article we have discussed bringing about
quality and integrity of food products, food safety
guarantees and associated transparency. Part of that
transparency is concerned with realizing tracking and
tracing systems with as primary objectives to enable
ecient recalls on the chain level when necessary and on
pro-active monitoring quality along chain processes
with as objective early warning in case of a possible
emerging problem and or aiming at optimizing the
remainder of processes along the supply chain downstream. It is beyond the scope of this article to deal in
depth with tracking and tracing and associated ICT issues. In that respect we would like to refer to a number
of publications of importance. These encompass Abbot
(1991), APICS (1998), Cheng and Simmons (1994),
Deasy (2002), Dorp, van Beulens, and Beers (2001),
Moe (1998), Petro and Hill (1991), Scheer (1998),
Scipioni, Saccarola, Centazzo, and Arena (2002), Steele
(1995) and T
oyryla (1999), that all cover related aspects
of tracking and tracing information systems.

Acknowledgements
KLICT is a Dutch public agency stimulating public
private partnerships and projects that aim at developing
and furthering knowledge on chain and network sci-

ences. All authors were partly aliated at KLICT during the conception of this article. Most of the cases are
KLICT projects. The support of KLICT is gratefully
acknowledged.

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