In recent years, thanks to the globalization of the food industry, the global ready-to-eat food and frozen food market has grown significantly. However, the globalization of the food industry has led to an increasingly complex food supply chain. In light of recent food safety scandals, food brands around the world are facing consumer trust. But what role does product traceability play in ensuring food safety? What are the challenges facing food manufacturers? How to overcome these challenges? The role of traceability in food safety In recent years, the regional food safety crisis has swept the world, from the European Union (EU) horse meat scandal to the bird flu in East Asia, to the fear of radiation after the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, all of which have affected consumers in their local supermarkets. The trust in the safety of the food purchased. These problems mean that producers of ready-to-eat foods and frozen foods need to use complex products and large amounts of raw materials, which poses challenges to identify the source of all materials on their production lines to ensure optimal product safety and quality. Through the use of appropriate technology and data monitoring systems, traceability plays a key role in helping manufacturers address these challenges, enabling manufacturers to fully understand the source of all raw materials used in their products. Not only does this mean understanding the source of these ingredients, but also understanding their growth, such as whether organic methods are used, or whether animal feeding standards are known. Informing and presenting such information to interested end consumers is critical to making the purchased foods truly organic, or building confidence from certified farms and countries. In addition, this information helps ensure food safety, demonstrates due diligence by manufacturers to regulators in the event of a product recall, and demonstrates every possible measure to minimize the risk to the public. Dedicated inks have good adhesion on the waxy surface of the box and on general-purpose plastic packaging, minimizing the risk of the code being worn away or blurred during transport. In addition to maintaining brand reputation, food producers have a legal obligation to meet stringent traceability requirements in order to comply with international food safety regulations. The European Union's General Food Law, the recently promulgated Food Safety Modernization Act in the United States, and China's Food Safety Act all provide for easy-to-trace solutions. International producers must comply with these terms and conditions to be allowed to enter these promising markets. Overcoming traceability barriers While optimizing traceability on the production line is important, food producers still face many challenges that must be overcome to ensure they can track products correctly throughout the product's supply and distribution chain. In the past decade, the global food supply chain has become more complex. Now, for many multinational producers, the raw materials come from one country/region, and the products are processed and packaged in a second country and sold by retailers in the third country. Dedicated inks have good adhesion on the waxy surface of the box and on general-purpose plastic packaging, minimizing the risk of the code being worn away or blurred during transport. As this complexity continues to increase, more and more safety regulations now require manufacturers to print on the packaging of the country of origin of the product – usually the country of purchase of the raw material. This coding process can be simplified if all raw materials come from a single country, but many ready-to-eat foods are likely to be made from raw materials from multiple markets. Manufacturers must ensure that they have the underlying equipment that keeps track of product batches throughout the supply chain. They also need to store and analyze batch information, the nature and source of the raw materials, and data on foreign matter contamination or product quality. Code legibility and accuracy are another obstacle to optimizing product traceability. Coding requires the tracking and traceability equipment to be easy to read, which means that the coding technology needs to be able to print accurately on the package at high speeds so as not to affect the production line throughput. To further optimize productivity (especially the productivity of food lines that produce a range of products on shorter production lines), to minimize the mis-coding of the print on the product packaging, the coding equipment needs to be able to quickly and easily convert the product without Affects production uptime. In addition, harsh production or storage environments can affect the effectiveness of traceable products. For example, we know that excessive air humidity can cause problems with the adhesion of standard inks during the printing process, hindering the drying of the ink, making the ink susceptible to dirt, and thus affecting the legibility of the finished code. Break the barrier Now, there are solutions on the market that overcome the traditional challenges of effective product traceability, even in complex multinational supply chains. A fully integrated traceability solution for production floor hardware and software systems that enables manufacturers to code individual parts of the same batch and then store data for each coded product. This allows manufacturers to capture detailed information on how each product package moves throughout the supply chain, optimizing safety and quality control, minimizing the risk that end consumers will buy unsafe products from sources. This data can also be imported into enterprise applications, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), to support manufacturers in analysing operational aspects that can be improved to optimize productivity. To further enhance their operational efficiency and productivity, manufacturers can take advantage of the coding system that supports the flexibility of the production line. The Coding Quality Assurance solution is a subset of a powerful traceability system that integrates the printer with a centralized database, allowing machine operators to choose from a large number of saved codes during product conversion. Simultaneously set up multiple systems from a single location. This minimizes printer setup time while reducing the risk of coding errors. This extends production uptime and increases productivity without compromising coding accuracy and compliance. For challenging production lines, manufacturers should choose hardware that is designed for harsh environments, with nozzles that prevent the accumulation of ink and dust that can cause downtime in a typical printer. Special inks are scratch-resistant and friction-resistant on flexible packaging. They have good adhesion on waxy surfaces of packaging (such as packaging boxes) and general-purpose plastic packaging, which minimizes the wear and tear of the code during transportation. The risk of ambiguity. Manufacturers should also consider hardware with a level of foreign body protection (IP) rating of 65 (dust and water), especially for regular flushing lines. By choosing such systems for production lines, ready-to-eat food and frozen food producers can overcome barriers to optimize traceability throughout their supply chain, ensure regulatory compliance and enhance consumer trust in their brands. Track global food traceability solutions Some experts predict that the global food industry will grow substantially in the next few years, driven by exports of food from China and Western countries, and its market value will reach $3.03 trillion by 2020. This growth will present challenges for manufacturers seeking to ensure optimal safety. However, by using the correct chasing ink to have good adhesion on the waxy surface of the package and the general plastic package, the risk of the code being worn away or blurred in transit is minimized. Trace and code tools allow manufacturers to track their products in a global supply chain to ensure safe, high quality food for consumers.