Traceability, Trust and Coordination in a Food Chain

In response to sanitary crisis, risk management has become a central issue for food producers and distributors in Europe. Organisational responses to sanitary risks usually implying traceability have been conceived by firms. One of the main tasks here is to deal with coordination of the different operators of a food chain. The European Union has developed a regulatory framework with the Regulation 178/2002. This regulation sets a mandatory traceability considered as a risk management tool. Traceability that was considered as a private initiative has therefore become an obligation with this regulation. This paper tries to evaluate if the problem of the operators coordination on specific traceability practices that any private organisational of a food chain had to face is solved with the strict application of the Regulation 178/2002. For that, the analysis characterises the mandatory traceability and the operators responsibilities set by the regulation. The coordination task and the problem of trust that it contains is then described. The analysis shows the limits of the mandatory traceability in this context and suggests a solution.