Traceability service centres supporting agri-food SMEs

The European Directive 178/2002 established a new framework for EU food legislation, which must come into force in all the Member States on 1(st) January 2005. Under the directive any company operating in the agri-food sector must have the capability to track the source of nourishments or components entering the production process of foodstuffs, and to make traceability information available to the competent authorities. These new obligations represent a big challenge for small companies, who do not have the necessary instruments to implement the required traceability. In order to prevent agri-food SMEs from undermining the citizen trustfulness in the European wide agri-food production, new solutions are needed to support effective vertical integration of traceability data along the different steps on the way "from farm to fork" of any foodstuff. The paper presents a new methodology combined with a software architecture specifically conceived to meet this challenge for the agri-food sector.