Start with your chain
A good filter does not start in RASFF, but in your own chain. List the raw materials, semi-finished products and packaging you buy, the countries they come from and the hazards that go with them. You often have that list already in your HACCP analysis or your risk assessment of raw materials.
Then translate that list into the categories of RASFF. Pistachios fall under nuts, nut products and seeds, paprika powder under herbs and spices and chicken fillet under poultry meat and poultry meat products.
The criteria to filter on
Every notification in RASFF has fixed properties you can filter on. The better you combine them, the less noise is left.
- Product category
- The kind of product, such as nuts, herbs, fish or feed. Usually the first criterion.
- Hazard category
- The kind of hazard, such as mycotoxins, pesticide residues, allergens or pathogenic micro-organisms.
- Risk decision and classification
- How serious the risk is and how urgent the notification, from alert notification to border rejection.
- Countries
- The country of origin and the countries the product was distributed to or that receive the notification for attention or follow-up.
- Text in the subject
- A word in the description, such as the name of a raw material that has no category of its own.
Combine narrowly instead of broadly
One broad filter on all your product categories soon brings dozens of notifications a week that do not concern you. Several narrow filters work better: one per group of raw materials, with the countries you buy them from and the hazards that go with them.
A few examples: nuts, nut products and seeds from Türkiye and Iran with mycotoxins as hazard, herbs and spices from India with pesticide residues, and all serious notifications about products distributed to the Netherlands.
Within a criterion one value is enough, across criteria everything has to match. A filter on nuts from Türkiye and Iran therefore finds nuts from Türkiye and nuts from Iran, but no herbs from Türkiye.
Do not forget the countries of distribution
A notification about a product from another country can still concern your chain, for example when it was distributed through a trader in the Netherlands or Belgium. So do not only filter on the country of origin, but also on the countries of distribution and the countries that receive the notification for attention or follow-up.
Those countries in particular are often added later. A notification that first only names Germany may name the Netherlands as a country of distribution a week later.
Notifications change after publication
Countries update notifications with new countries of distribution, a different risk decision or more information about the product. Whoever only looks at new notifications misses the older ones that become relevant through such a change.
So do not only look at what was notified today, but also at what changed in the notifications of the past weeks.
Review and record
A filter finds notifications, but the work is in what you do about them. Assess for every notification whether it affects your products or suppliers, and record what you did: called a supplier, asked for analyses or assessed the notification as not relevant, with the reason.
That record is exactly what an auditor wants to see: that you follow RASFF, assess notifications and follow up where needed. Review your filters as soon as your purchasing changes, for example with a new raw material or a new country of origin.
How filters work in Traecy
In Traecy you set up filters with all of these criteria. Twice a day Traecy checks new and changed RASFF notifications against them, and every weekday at 08:00 your team receives the notifications that match, with the suppliers they concern. For every notification you record what you did about it or why it is not relevant.