Making Traceability Meaningful: A Focused Ethnography of Digital Food Traceability Practices in Food Retailing

Abstract

Digital food traceability now appears on retail shelves through QR codes, digital labels, certification links, batch records, provenance narratives, and, increasingly, AI-supported interfaces. Yet retailers and technology providers often treat traceability as a transparency device whose value follows automatically from data availability. This article challenges that assumption through a focused ethnography of digital traceability practices in food retailing. The study draws on a multi-actor corpus consisting of 67 interviews with consumers, retail actors, producers and suppliers, certification or regulatory actors, and technology providers, complemented by structured retail observations, field memos, and traceability artifact analysis. The findings show that traceability becomes meaningful only when retail actors translate technical and supply-chain data into consumer-readable assurance and actionable value. Five themes structure the analysis: traceability first enters consumer attention through product risk and retail cueing; trust depends on verifiable anchors rather than technological claims; value emerges when assurance turns into product, ethical, and decision utility; interface friction and data inconsistency convert transparency into ornamental labeling; and retail mediation performs the practical translation work between supply-chain records and consumer meaning. The article contributes to research on food retailing and consumer trust by explaining how digital traceability moves from data infrastructure to market meaning. It also refines the assurance-value distinction by showing that consumers can trust traceability without treating it as worth paying more for. The study argues that meaningful traceability requires synchronized data, credible verification, legible interface design, and trained retail mediation, not merely more technological sophistication