Friday 21 January 2011

Traceability

For quite a while the buzz word with major supermarkets has been traceability, as anyone who read our blog will know, we buy very little from this type of store and try to source locally or at least buy stuff that is produced in the country we live in. Today I wanted to buy some prawns, the only so called 'fresh ones' I could find were from Saudi Arabia, the label stated that they were a farmed product, however what was missing from the label was a farm reference number or even a lot number. I walked away and decided I would look at the frozen sea food section, there it was even worse, although there were plenty of different types of prawns on display only one section had country of origin been displayed, the others just said prawns, not even what class they were.I'm sure that things are no different in other countries, and that supermarkets only insist on traceability on the soft touches, i.e.the local farmer selling fresh food. If it comes from one of the big distributors it seems that this traceability goes out of the window. So yet another good reason not to shop in supermarkets.