Traceability
Traceability is the ability to follow food, feed and raw material through every stage of production, processing and distribution. EU Regulation 178/2002 requires food businesses to work one step back and one step forward: you have to know who supplied the goods and who you released them to.
One step back means suppliers and intake documents; one step forward means the customers goods were dispatched to, with the final consumer excluded. The regulation does not prescribe a format or a system, it requires the company to hold the data and make it available to the authorities on request. In practice it comes down to a batch number that survives the handover between companies.
The harder part happens inside the plant, where raw material has to be linked to finished product. Blends from several deliveries, work in tanks, repacking, returns from the market. Without a record of which delivery went onto which shift and into which product, the trail stops at the entrance to the line even though intake and dispatch documents are complete.
The test of all this is the mock recall. You pick one batch and reconstruct its path in both directions, with quantities and documents, timing how long it takes. Industry standards expect a plant to run such a test periodically and record the result, and an auditor may ask to watch one live, on a batch they choose themselves.
You will recognise the topic if a complaint from a retail chain sets off a search through dispatch notes and notebooks, and answering "this is the batch and these are the customers it went to" takes a full day. Or if the recall test works out, but only because one person runs it and remembers where the paperwork is.