THE BOTTOM LINE
- Traceability is a real-time requirement: Your systems must provide accurate supplier and batch information to regulators immediately upon request during an inspection, not weeks or months later.
- Repeat offenses are costly: Courts will uphold significant fines, including doubled penalties for recidivism, viewing a history of non-compliance as a structural failure, not an isolated mistake.
- “Fixing it later” is no defense: The violation occurs the moment your traceability system fails an inspection. Proving a product’s origin after the fact will not absolve the initial breach.
THE DETAILS
A Dutch food company has learned a costly lesson after the District Court of Rotterdam upheld a €5,000 fine for serious lapses in its product traceability systems. The case began when inspectors from the Dutch Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) discovered crates of poultry meat with incorrect and missing labels. Some labels indicated a production date of the inspection day itself, which the company’s own quality manager admitted was impossible for a frozen product. Another crate had no label at all. This made it impossible for inspectors to immediately identify the product’s origin, a direct violation of the EU’s General Food Law (Regulation 178/2002), which mandates clear and accurate traceability at every stage of production and distribution.
The company’s primary defense was that the violation could be rectified. Eight months after the inspection, during its appeal, it provided documents purporting to trace the meat back to a specific supplier delivery. The company argued that since the origin could eventually be established, it had met the spirit of the law. The court decisively rejected this argument. It stressed that the core purpose of traceability is to enable a rapid response in a potential public health crisis, such as a salmonella outbreak. The law requires systems that function “quickly and accurately.” The inability to provide this critical information at the time of the inspection constituted the offense, and subsequent documentation could not erase that failure.
In upholding the full €5,000 fine, the court dismissed the company’s request for a simple warning or a reduced penalty. The court classified the breach as “severe” due to the serious potential risks to public health. Critically, the inspectors noted that the company had been cited for similar traceability failures during previous inspections. This pattern of recidivism demonstrated a structural problem rather than a one-off error, justifying the authority’s decision to double the standard €2,500 fine and making a strong statement that persistent non-compliance will not be tolerated.
SOURCE
Source: Rechtbank Rotterdam
