Blog
Le blog VeraTrace
Analyses, guides réglementaires et bonnes pratiques pour les producteurs, transformateurs et distributeurs alimentaires.
The Farming Debate Isn’t Too Complex. It’s Badly Described.
Latour and Spinoza: agricultural complexity isn’t excess chatter around a simple object — it’s an outdated apparatus of description. What actually changed is the cost of the singular.
The Gaze You Can’t Return
“It’s surveillance.” With Foucault and the panopticon: the three properties of a surveillance device — which ones a registry can reverse, and which it never can.
What Our Registry Will Never Be Able to Write
“You can’t put everything on a form”: with James C. Scott, mètis, and the Prussian forest — what a registry can attest to, and what it must never grade.
The Batch Number Is a Pineal Gland
Descartes separated thought and extension, then glued them back together with the pineal gland. Declarative traceability does the same thing with the batch number.
A Proof Is Not a Fact. It Is a Path.
What makes a proof is neither sincerity nor precision, but continuity: a chain of transformations in which every link remains reversible.
Who Keeps the Register?
Power does not reside in knowledge but in the place where inscriptions converge. The real question is not “do we need a register”, but who audits it.
A Tonne Is Not a Tonne
Origin or path? From the local-versus-commodity duel to the carbon credit: why a tonne is worth what its place is worth, and what an index changes about a credit.
What Modernization Left Out
A century multiplied yields and divided description. What changed is not morality but cost: green it, or bring it back in.
What the Price Doesn’t Say
Hayek (1945): price circulates knowledge that no one holds. But it says nothing about quality or path: nothing is missing from the price — what is missing is a price.
No One Will Read the Label
Herbert Simon, bounded rationality: four seconds facing thirty options. The label is a rational shortcut — but it still has to be decompressible.
Everything Was Fine the Day Before
Taleb’s turkey, the optimization that hides its trade-off, the aviation industry that learns: why an opaque chain breaks silently, then all at once.
The Stamp and the Thing
Ceremony or substance: with Spinoza, why a declaration of conformity is a rite — and how proof finally shows what the standard truly wants.
The Market for Lemons: What Akerlof Tells Us About Traceability
George Akerlof’s (Nobel laureate 1970) “market for lemons” theory explains why, absent proof, a product’s invisible quality ends up priced at the market average — and how traceability answers that.
Why Labels No Longer Convince Anyone
Michael Spence (Nobel 2001), costly signaling, and what separates proof from a promise: why a label anyone can slap on no longer signals anything — and how proof changes the game.
Who Sorts, When No One Proves Anything?
Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel 2001), screening, and why food sovereignty begins with verification: when the seller doesn’t signal, it’s the buyer who organizes the sorting.
Why Opacity Pays
Ronald Coase (Nobel 1991), transaction costs, and what happens to food supply chains when verification stops costing anything: the opacity rent, and its foretold end.
We Don’t Reassure. We Leave Fear Behind.
We do not fight one fear with another: why reassurance is never enough, and how proof leads out of food-related distrust.
Who Owns the Proof?
Elinor Ostrom (Nobel 2009), the governance of the commons, and the question that killed the agricultural-data platforms: proof whose value lies in its mass can only belong to those who create it.
Import Is Not a Sin
Import = bad, local = good? With Spinoza: the good is not a property but a relation. Traceability is a matter of proof, not morality.
Three Ways of Knowing a Tomato
Sign, reason, singular: Spinoza’s three kinds of knowledge applied to a tomato — from the label to the verifiable product passport.
Opacity Is Not a Lie
What a seventeenth-century philosopher has to do with traceability: why the opacity of an origin is not fraud but mutilated knowledge, to be restored rather than punished.
Food traceability: the complete 2026 guide
Definition, regulatory obligations (EU, France), upstream and downstream traceability, digital tools, wine e-label, EUDR, AGEC: everything a producer or distributor needs to know in 2026.
EUDR: what the anti-deforestation regulation changes for producers
Regulation (EU) 2023/1115: products covered (cocoa, coffee, wood, soy, palm oil, cattle, rubber), DDS obligations, geolocation, 2025 timeline, penalties of up to 4% of European turnover.
Wine e-label: 2024 obligations and 2026 best practices
Regulation (EU) 2021/2117 on electronic wine labelling: ingredients, nutritional values, QR code, allergens. What the regulation requires, what it allows, and the pitfalls to avoid.