How can food safety concerns be resolved? Look for the traceable agricultural product certification
[Traceable Agricultural Products Series, Part 1]
How to escape the food safety cloud of doubt? Look for traceable agricultural products
Looking at what people consider when shopping, the familiarity with traditional market vendors in the early agricultural society has slowly shifted to trust in brand trademarks in modern large hypermarkets, as if the wonderful scenarios described in TV commercials all deserve to be trusted unconditionally!? But in recent years, incidents such as tainted starch, adulterated oil, and expired foods reaching the market have all shown that big brands can also make mistakes. So how exactly should we choose products we can safely eat?
In recent years, the government has amended laws and invested heavily in establishing the "Non-Traceable, No Go" mechanism, attempting to untangle food safety problems, but (June 105) when actually entering the website to search, some product pages only show basic information such as product name and specifications, and are even less detailed than the product outer packaging labels.
Nowadays, our standards for choosing products should become increasingly rigorous. Have you ever seen advertising copy in the fresh food sections of large hypermarkets such as Carrefour and PX Mart emphasizing that products have an "ID card"? This is the "traceable agricultural product certification" mechanism promoted by the Council of Agriculture, Executive Yuan for nearly ten years, and it is also the only certification mark in all of Taiwan, China that can trace the source of ingredients and the production process.
Every package of product that passes traceable agricultural product certification has a sticker on its outer packaging representing an ID card. Do not underestimate it; it gathers the care of all producers. As long as you use your mobile phone to scan the QRcode, you can immediately learn who raised (grew), slaughtered (harvested), processed (cut), packaged and transported the product. The entire process has complete records available for inquiry. This information is all stored in the Council of Agriculture database and is also inspected from time to time.
Being able to affix a "traceable agricultural product" sticker on a product means that every production process must pass certification and comply with paper records and truthful online registration. No step can be missing, and the entire process is checked by the Council of Agriculture and third-party certification bodies. Producers must expend a great deal of extra thought and cost.
In addition, traceable agricultural products have a unique batch number, and mixing is prohibited by regulation. Taking domestic pork as an example, pigs from farm A cannot be processed together with those from farm B, or slaughtered together with pigs from the auction market at slaughterhouse C. In this way, all processes for each batch of meat can be traced, so that we can truly "see it to believe it"!