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Summary

The Global Traceability Framework for Beef and Leather (GTFBL) establishes the foundational requirements for achieving interoperable, digital traceability across beef and leather supply chains. Developed as a practical, instructional resource for diverse stakeholders—including producers, processors, distributors, technology providers, and regulators involved in beef and leather supply chains—the framework defines shared rules for how traceability data should be captured, structured and exchanged.

The Need for Traceability

Beef and leather supply chains are incredibly complex, often spanning multiple countries, involving hundreds of supply chain actors, and operating under diverse regulatory and certification regimes. Ensuring visibility and accountability in these systems is essential not only for food safety and product integrity, but also for meeting sustainability, legality, and consumer expectations.

Traceability provides the foundation for this visibility by enabling supply chain actors to follow products complex, globalized supply networks. Within this framework, traceability is defined as the ability to follow a product and its components through all stages of the supply chain, from origin to final point of distribution.

The Need for Interoperability

As companies adopt digital traceability solutions, the absence of standardized practices risks creating fragmented, incompatible systems that operate in silos. True visibility and efficiency across supply chains requires interoperability—the ability of different digital systems to exchange and interpret data without human intervention.

Interoperability is essential for scalability. No single technology solution can meet the needs of every actor in global beef and leather supply chains. By aligning around a common framework, stakeholders can ensure their data systems communicate seamlessly, avoid costly duplication, and enable system-level traceability.

Event-Based Traceability as a Foundation

The GTFBL is grounded in event-based traceability, the leading methodology for tracking products across complex supply chains. Instead of relying on static or summary records, event-based systems capture real-world product movements and transformations as they occur.

• Supply chains are broken into Critical Tracking Events (CTEs)—such as creation, shipping, or receiving—that are common across industries.
• At each CTE, supply chain actors capture Key Data Elements (KDEs)—the “who, what, where, and when” of each event.

This method creates a dynamic product history that provides a detailed, real-time view of product movement from origin to endpoint. Importantly, each actor retains ownership of the data they generate, reducing the need for centralized repositories while enhancing data security and trust.

Event-based traceability is already widely used in sectors such as food, pharmaceuticals, and apparel. Global standards like GS1’s EPCIS and initiatives like the Global Dialogue on Seafood Traceability (GDST) are built on these principles. The GTFBL applies this proven approach to beef and leather, defining a consistent set of CTEs and KDEs that together establish the foundation for interoperable traceability.

Toward Shared, System-Wide Practices

The Global Traceability Framework for Beef and Leather is designed to serve as both a technical guide and a practical manual. It provides clear, standardized requirements for data capture and exchange while remaining accessible to diverse stakeholders.

By aligning around this framework, supply chain actors can:

• Reduce the costs and complexities of data sharing.
• Facilitate compliance with evolving regulatory and market requirements.
• Enable system-wide visibility and accountability.
• Strengthen Consumer and buyer trust through verified traceability.

Importantly, this framework reflects an aspirational goal state for the beef and leather industries rather than the current baseline. It defines a shared vision for how traceability can and should function across supply chains, while recognizing that reaching this state will require time, resources, and collaboration. Stakeholders are not expected to immediately collect and exchange all relevant data, but rather to progress step by step, building alignment and capacity along the way. In this way, the framework provides both a long-term vision and a practical roadmap for sector-wide improvement.