Traceability in the Food Supply Chain: Review of the literature from a technological perspective

Abstract

[EN] An increasingly customer-oriented food industry needs faster response times to address dynamic and collaborative supply chains. Good traceability systems help to minimize the production and distribution of unsafe or poor quality products. Therefore, traceability is applied as a tool to help ensure the safety and quality of food, as well as to achieve consumer confidence. New technologies are being used and new proposals are being tested in this field. Industry 4.0 includes a variety of technologies that enable the development of a digital and automated manufacturing environment. These new technologies are implying a drastic change in the way companies operates. These tech-nologies are having a high impact in different areas of the company, and naturally, the traceability processes are included in this new wave of changes. The terms "tracing" and "tracking" are generally discussed in traceability. Tracing is defined as a retroactive process in which the origin is identified by the history or the records in the supply chain and tracking is the direct process in which the end users and the trading partners are identified by the location in the supply chain, both terms provide visibility in supply chains. In the present work a literature review is realized on the implementation of in-dustry 4.0 in the traceability of the food supply chain. As a result of this literature re-view have been possible to note that the interest is growing and is concentrated in the last five years. Furthermore, the temporal evolution of technologies applied in the trace-ability of food supply chain is becoming increasingly complex due to the inclusion of new proposals (RFID, QR, NFC, Barcode, ¿). Finally, an analysis of the technologies applied to different areas of the food sector is presented, thus proposals for fruit, vege-tables, meat or fish have been analyzed and the Industry 4.0 technologies have been identified for each area. This study makes it possible to reveal clearly those sectors that have not yet been approached by these new proposals, as well as technologies that are been applied in Industry 4.0 proposals but have not been used for traceability. Thus, the present work enables the identification of research gaps in this field.

[ES] Una industria alimentaria, cada vez más orientada al cliente, necesita tiempos de respuesta más rápidos para conseguir cadenas de suministro dinámicas y colaborativas. Los sistemas de trazabilidad ayudan a minimizar problemas por la producción y distribución de productos inseguros o de baja calidad. Por lo tanto, la trazabilidad se presenta como una herramienta para ayudar a garantizar la seguridad y la calidad de los alimentos, así como para lograr la confianza del consumidor. En el presente trabajo se realiza una revisión bibliográfica sobre la implementación de la industria 4.0 en la tra-zabilidad de la cadena de suministro alimentaria