Meat traceability for butchers in Spain: record and label

Why meat carries stricter rules than other fresh food

EU food law requires every food business to be able to identify who it bought a product from and who it sold it to, the so called "one step back, one step forward" traceability (Regulation (EC) 178/2002, Article 18). With meat, that general rule is reinforced with species-specific country of origin labelling: compulsory for beef since 2002 under Regulation (EC) 1760/2000, and extended to pork, sheep, goat and poultry by Regulation (EU) 1337/2013, in force since 2015. The aim is to be able to trace a cut back to the animal, or the slaughter batch, it came from, which matters most in a health alert or a product recall.

For a butcher's shop or delicatessen, that turns into two obligations that go hand in hand: keeping an internal record of every movement (purchase, cutting, sale) and labelling what leaves the counter with the information the law requires.

What you have to record (internal traceability)

Keeping the supplier's delivery notes in a folder isn't enough. For traceability to actually work, every batch of meat coming in has to stay linked to the cuts or products that come out of it after butchering or preparation:

• Goods in: supplier, date, batch number and, for species under origin labelling, the country or countries of birth, rearing and slaughter.
• Cutting and processing: which incoming batch was used to make each product (minced meat, marinated cuts, in-house cured products).
• Goods out: who it was sold to, or what goes on the label for direct retail sale, and the date.

What has to go on the fresh meat label

Meat labelling combines the general food information rules in Regulation (EU) 1169/2011 with the species-specific origin rules above. For prepacked fresh meat sold to the final consumer, you'll generally need:

• Name of the product (species and, where relevant, the cut).
• Batch number, linking the label back to the internal record.
• Country or countries of origin: birth, rearing and slaughter (compulsory for beef, pork, sheep, goat and poultry).
• Use-by or best-before date, storage conditions and weight.
• Allergens, if the product carries any (cured products with sulfites, for example).

At the counter, when meat is sold loose and unpackaged, most of this information (origin, batch) still has to be available to the customer even though it isn't printed piece by piece, usually through a sign or document visible at the point of sale.

Keeping it manageable day to day

The simplest way to sustain this is for traceability and labelling to come out of the same place where you already run the rest of the business, instead of being a separate task. With digital traceability built for butchers, every delivery note you log is linked automatically to the products you make afterwards, so the batch travels on its own all the way to the final label without you typing it in twice.

This also makes costing each cut or prepared product easier, because the real purchase cost is already tied to the batch you used, and an inspection or recall gets solved by checking the history instead of searching through folders.