How to check where your food really comes from

Most food sold in the UK only has to be traceable one step back, to whoever supplied it, not all the way to the farm that grew it. That is the legal minimum, not a loophole: a shop only has to know its wholesaler's name, and the wholesaler only has to know its supplier's name, and so on up the chain. Nobody in that chain is required to tell you which actual farm your carrots came from. If you want to know the real source, you have to look for a seller that volunteers it, because the law does not make them.

What does "traceable" legally mean?

Food traceability runs on what is known as the "one step back, one step forward" principle, set out in article 18 of the General Food Law — regulation 178/2002, retained in UK law after Brexit. A business has to be able to identify who supplied it and who it supplied in turn. That is the whole requirement. It says nothing about the business two or three steps further back in the chain, which is exactly where the actual farm usually sits once food has passed through a wholesaler and a distributor before reaching a shelf.

Origin labelling is a separate rule, and a narrower one. Under the Food Information to Consumers regulation, article 26 makes the country of origin mandatory where leaving it off might mislead the shopper about where the food really comes from — in particular where the label as a whole would otherwise imply a different origin. That is a protection against a misleading impression, not a general duty to say where something was grown.

Beef is the strict exception, and it is worth looking at closely, because it shows the ceiling of what labelling law asks for. Beef labelling rules require the country where the animal was born, the country where it was reared, the country where it was slaughtered, and the country where the carcass was cut, each stated on the pack. That is the most detailed origin labelling in ordinary retail — four countries and two approval numbers — and it still never names a farm. More label text does not automatically mean more traceable: the two have been drifting apart rather than together.

Why "local" and "British" do not mean what shoppers assume

A label can say "British" and still be telling the truth about only part of what is inside. If the packaging implies a single country of origin through a flag or a word, but the main ingredient actually comes from somewhere else, the rules require the true origin of that ingredient to be given too, usually in smaller print. It is a real protection, but it only catches the cases that would otherwise mislead. A pack with no flag and no claim at all does not trigger it, which is why plenty of produce carries no origin information beyond a country-level sticker, if that.

"Local" is weaker still, because nothing defines it legally. A shop can call a product local if it was grown in the same county, the same region, or sometimes just the same country, and no rule forces a specific radius. Two sellers can both say "local" about produce grown a long way apart from each other, and both are technically correct.

What does a named producer tell you that a region does not?

Knowing a product came from a county tells you a region. Knowing it came from a named farm in that county tells you something you can actually check: a real business, a real grower, a specific operation you can look up. That is the gap a marketplace model closes that a generic "local" or "British" label does not. On GetEats, every product carries the name of the farm or producer that supplied it, not just the platform selling it, so a pack of cheese or a crate of eggs has an identity behind it rather than a region.

This matters most when something goes wrong. Food safety alerts and recall notices are only as fast as the traceability chain behind them. "One step back" means a retailer can identify its wholesaler quickly, but tracing the actual farm from there depends on that wholesaler, and the supplier behind the wholesaler, each answering in turn. A delay at any single link slows the whole chain down, and a shopper reading the alert has no way to know how many links sit between the shelf and the farm. A system that names the producer on the product itself skips that chain: the source was never hidden, so there is nothing to trace in an emergency.

A common mistake: treating "organic" as proof of traceability

Organic certification and traceability answer two completely different questions, and shoppers often assume one implies the other. Certification tells you how a product was grown or raised: the methods, inputs and standards a farm followed. It says nothing about who that farm was. A shop can stock an organic product that passed through three anonymous intermediaries before reaching the shelf — fully certified and completely untraceable to a named grower at the same time. If knowing the specific source matters to you as much as knowing the growing method, check for a named producer separately. One does not cover the other.

How do you actually check before you buy?

Look for a name, not a region. "Grown in Kent" is a region. "Grown by" followed by an actual farm is a name you can search and verify. If a seller only offers the first kind of claim, the actual source is sitting somewhere further up a chain nobody is required to disclose to you. A shop that prints the producer's name against every individual item, not just once on an "about us" page, is making a traceability claim that can be checked line by line, rather than a general promise about sourcing philosophy.

It also helps to notice whether a seller names a different farm for different products in the same order. One generic "sourced from local farms" tagline covering an entire catalogue is a weaker signal than ten products each naming a different grower, because that level of granularity is harder to fake and costs more to maintain. If you are curious how this looks on a working storefront, meet the makers puts faces and farm names to a real GetEats order, and why buying direct matters covers the fresher-chain argument that traceability is part of. If you are weighing up how to buy this way at all, the comparison of veg boxes, CSA shares and marketplaces sets the three models side by side, and our complete guide to buying direct from farms walks through what to expect from checkout to delivery.

None of this means the law is failing shoppers. "One step back, one step forward" exists to make a recall workable, not to satisfy curiosity about where dinner came from, and it does that job reasonably well. But workable and informative are different goals, and the gap between them is exactly where your own checking has to pick up the slack. The law sets the floor. Whether you know the name of the farm behind what is in your basket is still, in practice, down to which seller you choose.