'Topping up' - bulk commodities and traceability

Hi everyone.

Has anyone any experience and/or best practice recommendations around capturing traceability for bulk, free-flowing commodities that storage constraints may mean silos need to be 'topped up' by successive consignments?

One approach I've seen is to take a measure of the resident volume and the frequencies of replenishments (e.g. four per annum) and calculate how many consignments back any traceability may have to consider to confidently capture all of any implicated materials.

Admittedly, under this scenario, the scope and complexity of any given trace challenge is greatly enlarged, but it would be good to know if anyone is aware of any kind of standard protocol that is recognized within the food ingredients sector?

Thank you. 

Hi,

I currently work in a similar system with a liquid material.
We have in the past determined that after four loadings on top of this product we can assume it is completely diluted and no longer has a relevant presence in the product.
I would advise to see if there is a industry standard to determine this for your product. 
As long as you can substantiate when the product should be completely gone from the silos you can trace back from that point.
 

Hi everyone.

 

Has anyone any experience and/or best practice recommendations around capturing traceability for bulk, free-flowing commodities that storage constraints may mean silos need to be 'topped up' by successive consignments?

 

One approach I've seen is to take a measure of the resident volume and the frequencies of replenishments (e.g. four per annum) and calculate how many consignments back any traceability may have to consider to confidently capture all of any implicated materials.

 

Admittedly, under this scenario, the scope and complexity of any given trace challenge is greatly enlarged, but it would be good to know if anyone is aware of any kind of standard protocol that is recognized within the food ingredients sector?

Thank you. 

Like many things in food it will be dependent on your circumstances, what is the stored material and what is the contaminant.  Finding a standard seems unlikely beyond separation at sanitation cycles.

If you have a solid contaminant in a liquid that settles out, you potentially resolve it very differently than if the contaminant is a solute that is just being sequentially diluted.  Similar variation will exist for how the material is extracted from the vessel.

Thanks for your feedback.