Identification marks and health marks are the oval-shaped markings found on food products of animal origin in the European Community, required by European Unionfood safety regulations. It identifies the processing establishment that produced and packaged the product and that is therefore responsible for its hygienestatus. These marks are meant as a monitoring and tracking aid for food safety and customs inspectors, and each food processingfacility dealing with food products of animal origin is required to keep records of its trading partners and their approval numbers, both for buying and selling. The identification and health marks are not an indication for the specific origin of a particular piece of food by themselves, as they do not encode the location of the farm that provided the initial raw product or livestock. However, consumers could use them to identify the actual manufacturer behind supermarket store brandproducts, where the labeling deliberately lacks any information about the real producer, which could be one that otherwise produces high-quality products using its regular brandings.
The EC/853/2004 regulation defines the identification mark, and the EC/854/2004 regulation defines the health mark. The former is in effect only when there is no need for the latter, though they use essentially the same marking style.
Meaning
The identification and health marks contains the following information in an oval:
the name of the country in which the product was processed, or more commonly its two-letter ISOcountry code ;
the nationalapproval number of the facility where the food was processed ;
the letters EC for European Community, or their equivalents in other EU languages, but only if the source materials were produced in/imported from another EC member state.
Examples
An example of a simple identification mark: Where HU is the country code for Hungary, 260 is the national approval number of a processing facility, and EK stands for Európai Közösség. Another example with a more complex national approval number: Where FR is the country code for France, 49.099.001 is a complex national approval number, which encodes some geographic data about the facility, and CE stands for Communauté européenne.
Usage
contributors collect all those codes from photographs of products, and the project provides lists and maps of EC marks with matching producers and cities.
