The Tracing Paper

EU Identification Mark comprising
UK - country code
AZ020 - establishment code
EC - European Commission indication
Search EC marks with Food Tracer

To decode your food, use The Tracing Paper’s Food Tracer - a searchable list of all UK identification codes.

What are those oval codes?

If you buy meat - or fish, milk, cheese or any food produced from or by an animal - in the European Union, you should find an oval symbol like this somewhere on the packaging. This example is from a Tesco own-label apple turnover. What is it and what does it mean?

More fundamentally, why does our food carry obscure codes that mean little to the consumer? It’s all part of a food system that relies on traceability - allowing food to be traced back along the supply chain, in theory to the point of production - but provides consumers with little in the way of transparency - clear and accessible information on where the food comes from.

The oval symbol is the EU identification mark (or on wholesale cuts of meat from an abattoir, the very similar EU health mark), required by law in this form since 1st January 2006 (with some allowance for the phasing in of packaging etc) on all food of animal origin, except for eggs.

What the EU identification mark means

According to the UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA), the mark

“shows that the food has been produced to the current standards of hygienic food production in licensed premises and allow food to be traced back to those premises. Health marks don’t show which country the food or its ingredients came from.”

The mark shows the last point of production of the food but says nothing about where the ingredients themselves came from. So the “UK” on my apple turnover tells me the turnover itself was made in the UK - at AZ020, wherever that might be - but doesn’t mean the apples, cream or any other ingredient came from the UK.

(For a full list of EC country codes, corresponding countries and links to national databases of approved production sites, see EC Food Identification Mark National Codes.)

Decoding the identification mark

At least the mark shows the licence number of the last premises to process the food in any way. But where is AZ020? Googling “AZ020″ may not provide the answer, but deep on the FSA website is a set of spreadsheets, listing licence numbers and the corresponding premises for dairy and meat products. So I find out that my turnover was made at premises “AZ/20/M” (hence no search result for AZ020) or Kensey Foods, at Launceston in Cornwall.

It’s a mystery to me why these licence numbers aren’t made more accessible to the public. Don’t we have a right to know who produced our food? Ideally I’d like to know as much as possible about the food I eat, right back to the field and cow, but just to know the last processor would be a start. It was once taken for granted that a producer’s name should be on the food they make, but the abundance of supermarket own-label foods now means that much of our food is made by producers hidden from public view.

Food Tracer - helping you trace the origins of your food

The Tracing Paper’s Food Tracer project aims to make as much information about the provenance of our food as accessible as possible.

So far, the details of all UK dairy premises and English abattoirs are listed in simple tables. It’s rather primitive for now, but the information should be more accessible than the FSA’s hard to find spreadsheets.

When Google crawl and index these pages, searching will be more straightforward. For the time being, you’ll have to scroll through the table or use your browser’s page search feature (try Ctrl-F or Apple-F).

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