The traceability of goods is crucial to firms’ production and trading activities, but public awareness of the importance of traceability remains low, said Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Dang Hoang An during a seminar held by the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MoIT) on Friday in Ha Noi.

In the traceability system, the origin-tracing stamp is regarded an important factor which identifies and tracks a product unit in the supply chain, the responsibilities of the parties involved in the production, packaging and distribution phases, An said.

This helps to link data and access information throughout the supply chain, An said.

In Viet Nam, product traceability is relatively new but has been implemented rapidly. The use of origin-tracing stamps is becoming more and more common, thereby enhancing consumers’ trust in products, he added.

According to An, Vietnamese enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, are still unaware of the method and find it hard to develop the system of traceability for their products.

Amy Guihot, an agricultural counselor from the Australian Embassy in Ha Noi, said product traceability is an important part of the Australian food management system for both domestically-consumed and export food.

Therefore, for food processing enterprises, traceability must determine the origin of all inputs such as raw materials, additives, ingredients and packaging methods. Traceability also provides information such as the name and address of the suppliers, the date of delivery, shipment details, quantity of the product upon delivery, Guihot said.

Dang Thi Phuong Ninh, general director of the Duyen Hai Economic Development Company (COFIDEC), said more and more agricultural products from Viet Nam were being exported to the world market. Traceability was thus an important foundation for creating a secure supply chain to gain the importers’ trust and loyalty.

COFIDEC applies traceability technology for 100 per cent of its 5,000 tonnes of processed agricultural and aquatic products in 2018. Since then, COFIDEC has gradually gained trust and loyalty from the big customers in Japan and South Korea.

Ninh said the fourth industrial revolution has fundamentally changed business and management models with many advanced technologies and practical applications such as cloud technology, blockchain and hardware devices and control chips.

With that advantage, the application of the achievements in the 4.0 revolution in traceability will become a major trend. In the future, COFIDEC will implement an electronic traceability system for the whole supply chain to achieve sustainable development. — VNS