Question about Traceability

Dear CCG,

I shared on the Secure Scuttlebutt Network about the upcoming "Intro to VCs in Supply Chain" and about the Traceability Vocab. Bob Haugen from Mikorizal Software responded with a question:

> Looks to me like they are focusing on properties of
> products-to-be-traced, possibly so the actual tracing does not need
> to be done? Or not?
> 
> Whereas Valueflows (and my previous experience in actual food supply
> chains) focus on tracing backward through the recorded material
> flows. https://valueflo.ws/appendix/track.html
> 
> So if you had verifiable credentials of eg some food that was
> poisoned (eg e. coli contamination), that fact would most likely be
> verified (if at all) only at the point where the poison was
> discovered, but not to the source of the contamination (feeding
> animal body parts to other animals) which would most likely not have
> been verified even then. But by tracing back to the source CAFO
> (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) and in some cases source animal,
> the cause might be determined, and then the destinations of the other
> cuts of the same contaminated animal, or all animals from that CAFO,
> could be found for a recall.
> 
> The US Food and Drug Administration (and I expect similar
> institutions in other countries) require all of those tracking and
> tracing records to be preserved and available for reporting. The
> tracking and tracing processes are then something like a web crawl
> through links from one event to the previous or next events.s.

> [...] But this would be an active issue for us if and only if we
> are working with a network that wants to use VCs.
> 
> P.S. my example above was a bit misleading. For feeding animal body 
> parts to other animals, the problem would be mad cow disease (chronic 
> wasting disease, or prions), and not e. coli.

Would anyone have an answer or reference I could pass on to Bob? Or might this be addressed in the 101?

Thanks,
Charles

Received on Sunday, 18 April 2021 13:38:58 UTC