Incentives to enable food traceability and its implication on food traceability system design

Food Traceability is regarded as a critical capability to enable and improve food safety both in public and private sector. However, the market practice to food traceability system (FTS) is not perfect. In lots of cases, the inefficient traceability supply is attributed to the gap of public's demand on higher traceability level and private companies' insufficient supply as expected. The fact is that public sector is less informed about quality and safety attributes of food than private sector, but private sector does not have adequate incentive to cover the gap. In order to explore how to mitigate the gap, this paper reviewed the key concepts and adoption history of FTS, compared the different incentives of each role in the ecosystem to adopt FTS, and analyzed the impacts of those incentives on the system design. Then a conceptual framework is developed to guide the FTS design with insight in the architecture design, functionality collection and business model design. Finally, theoretical and practical implications are discussed and future research opportunities are suggested.