Enhancing Vietnamese Cross-Border Food Safety with Track-and-Trace Platform ezTRACK

In both the domestic and export markets of Vietnam, traceability of food products and the ability to quickly recall unsafe products are becoming urgent requirements. To align with the global trends and accelerate the progress of market access for agricultural, aquatic and processed food products, the Vietnam Government issued a directive “Decision 100/QD-TTg” in 2019, with the goal to build a traceability system and a national traceability portal, to ensure quality, safety and transparency for Vietnamese products, especially the food items.

GS1 Vietnam – National Numbering and Barcodes Centre (NBC), a public agency under the Commission for Standards, Metrology and Quality of Vietnam, is responsible for setting guidelines and recommendations for technical interoperability that facilitate compliance with regulations and data exchange between public and private traceability systems, as well as develop and implement the Vietnam National Traceability Portal (VNTP). 

NBC/GS1 Vietnam thus engaged GS1 Hong Kong to conduct cross border traceability pilot by building a digital food traceability system with the use of ezTRACK platform for Hong Kong and Vietnam users.

The GS1 teams in Vietnam and HK joint hands to map out related stakeholders, define dataset and documents needed, across an end to end supply chain. A food item, frozen fish finger, was identified for the pilot where 4 major parties are involved along the trade route:

• CP Vietnam, an exporter from Vietnam
• CP Food HK, an importer from Hong Kong, and its logistics services provider
• GS1 Hong Kong, project manager of this pilot and proprietary owner of ezTRACK platform, a real-time track-and-trace platform built on Electronic Product Code (EPC) standard
• NBC/GS1 Vietnam, project owner and facilitate with CP Vietnam

Upon a shipment schedule was agreed on and traceability data defined by all parties, ezTRACK was used to capture and share the traceability data, including certificate of origin, batch no., expiry/best before date, health certificate, arrival notice, etc., all essential to improving the visibility, integrity and transparency of cross-border trade.

Participants were asked to capture the data during the 3 key phrases across the supply chain and upload onto the EPCIS databases ezTRACK, which include 1) goods dispatch from overseas, 2) goods landed in Hong Kong, and 3) goods transfer to warehouse. The illustration below shows the event data that were recorded.

To enable the data in the pilot shared/accessed by consumer, an interface was developed by GS1 Hong Kong and a QR code was used to allow consumers scan and read thorough traceability information easily.

The project has demonstrated the value of using GS1 standards for traceability and process efficiencies in cross-border trade and food sector. Next steps of the work include co-training, adoption promotion and support to local users, developing implementation guideline, and validating product information with fully digitalised traceability procedure.

The collaboration pilot has brought benefits in ways of:

• Lowered food safety risk with enhanced traceability
• Better compliance to cross-border regulatory measures on traceability and thus access to market
• Enhanced supply chain efficiency with clear knowledge of shipments across traders & shippers
• Developed traceability dataset for future reference  

• GS1 HK’s Smart Professional Services
• ezTRACK

As a leading agro-industrial and food conglomerate from the Asia Pacific region, Charoen Pokphand Foods Public Company Limited (CPF) operates in both livestock (swine, broilers, layers, and ducks) and aquaculture (shrimp and fish) businesses, with 4 major categories: feed business, farm business, food business and retail business & food outlets.

NBC/GS1 Vietnam is the National Numbering and Barcodes Center, under the Commission for Standards, Metrology and Quality of Vietnam, Ministry of Science and Technology, recognized as an official member of GS1 international since May 1995 and assigned the GS1 national code 893. As of December 2024, GS1 Vietnam has more than around 80,000 active business members, with about 50% in the food industry. Its national product catalog has grew to more than 1.6 million registered products.