Food Tracing and Interoperability of Information Systems in the Hungarian Meat Industry

The manufacture, distribution and retailing of foodstuffs became an extraordinarily complex business activity. The complete food chain must provide for the implementation of the strictest quality standards and safety regulations. Problems of food safety can be solved by keeping (and enforcing) applicable regulations, by introducing modern quality assurance systems, by making possible the traceability of products and their identification. The safety of product lines and tracing of products cannot be solved without using information systems of a certain level. During our research, it came to light that, generally, agrarian traceability struggles with many more problems. Companies try to live up to expectation, but they often apply different solutions with totally different approaches, while serving several different market aspects, depending on their customers. The conception of the Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) has come, to build an Internet-based environment in which businesses will be able to interact with each other efficiently. The DBE solutions based on community philosophy are able to create applications, which can solve most of food traceability problems.