The Client
fTRACE is a product operated by GS1 Germany and its partners that helps food manufacturers, processors, and retailers comply with EU traceability legislation. The platform gives every stakeholder in the supply chain (from the farm to the retail shelf) the ability to provide and access batch-level information about product origins, processing, and quality. Consumers can scan a code on any retail package and instantly see where their food came from and how it was handled.
The platform had been in production for years, but required a complete architectural overhaul to handle its growing customer base and the increasing complexity of global food supply chains.
The Challenge
Building a traceability platform for global food supply chains is fundamentally different from building a conventional CRUD application. The domain presented six distinct engineering challenges that shaped every architectural decision:
Dynamic Chain Structures
Supply chains are not linear. Products are combined, split, transformed, and re-routed. The data model needed to represent arbitrarily nested, branching event chains.
Sub-Second Query Latency
When a consumer scans a product, the full traceability history must render instantly, even when that history spans multiple countries and processing stages.
High-Velocity Event Capture
Thousands of supply chain events (harvesting, shipping, processing, packaging) arrive per second from partners worldwide. Every event must be captured reliably with zero data loss.
Semi-Structured Event Data
Events arrive in varying formats from different GS1 partners. The system needed to ingest, normalize, and index data without rigid schema constraints.
Horizontal Scalability
From 10 customers to 700. From one country to 30. The architecture had to scale linearly without re-engineering core components.
Pluggable Client Customization
Every major retailer and manufacturer has unique reporting needs. The system required a pluggable architecture where client-specific modules could be added without touching the core platform.
Our Approach
Brevitaz embedded with the fTRACE domain team from day one. Rather than treating this as a contract-to-spec engagement, our engineers participated directly in architecture decisions, technology selection, and data modelling. The result was a solution designed around the domain, not around a tech stack chosen in a boardroom.
Key Engineering Decisions
Graph Database for Traceability Chains
Food supply chains form a directed acyclic graph, not a table. Brevitaz chose JanusGraph to model traceability events as vertices and edges, enabling both forward tracing (where did this product go?) and backward tracing (where did this product come from?) with a single traversal query. Elasticsearch and AWS DynamoDB served as the storage backends, giving JanusGraph the horizontal scalability the platform needed.
Apache Kafka for Reliable Event Ingestion
With events streaming in from hundreds of partners worldwide, Brevitaz built a Kafka-based pipeline to guarantee zero event loss and decouple capture from processing. Events could be ingested at burst rates far exceeding normal throughput without backpressure affecting upstream systems.
Apache Spark for Data Enrichment
Raw supply chain events needed to be enriched, aggregated, and transformed for client-specific reporting. Spark jobs processed events in near-real-time, preparing data for both the graph database and the Elasticsearch reporting cluster.
Microservices with OSGi for Pluggability
Each client's unique reporting and compliance needs were handled through independently deployable OSGi modules. This gave the platform the ability to serve 700 customers with different requirements without accumulating a monolithic codebase. New client integrations could ship without redeploying the core.
Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber
In a domain where business rules are complex and domain knowledge is critical, Brevitaz used Cucumber to turn requirements into executable specifications. This kept business stakeholders aligned with the development team and reduced the gap between what was specified and what was delivered.
The Technology Stack
The Results
Millisecond Queries
End consumers get full traceability chains in tens of milliseconds, from farm to shelf, across borders.
Massive License Savings
100% open-source data stack eliminated six-figure annual license fees that proprietary alternatives would have required.
30-Country Scale
The platform grew from a handful of European customers to serving 700 organizations across 30 countries without re-architecture.
On Time, On Scope, On Quality
Every major milestone delivered within the agreed timeline and scope, a rarity in platform re-engineering projects of this complexity.
Faster Feature Delivery
Clean, modular codebase and BDD practices significantly reduced the turnaround time for new features and client-specific enhancements.
Seamless Collaboration
Cucumber-based executable specs kept business and engineering aligned, reducing specification drift to near zero.
A Decade-Long Partnership
Brevitaz has been the engineering backbone of fTRACE since 2014, designing the architecture, building the platform, and supporting its growth through multiple generations. The platform now tracks 242,000 products and 256 million events, running reliably in production every single day.
Why This Matters
Food traceability is not just a technical challenge; it is a matter of public health, regulatory compliance, and consumer trust. When a foodborne illness outbreak occurs, the ability to trace a product back to its source in minutes rather than days can prevent harm to thousands of people. When the EU tightens traceability regulations, companies need a platform that is already compliant, not one that needs to be retrofitted.
Brevitaz did not just build software for fTRACE. We built the infrastructure that lets a consumer in Berlin scan a package of salmon and instantly see where it was caught, how it was processed, and every hand it passed through on its way to the shelf. That is the kind of engineering we do.
They develop and manage our mission-critical and complex production systems well. You can throw a new technology at them and they quickly make production-grade use of it. They deal with our high-priority customers with huge business value.
Building a Data-Intensive Platform?
Whether it is supply chain traceability, event processing at scale, or graph-based data models, Brevitaz brings deep engineering expertise to complex platform challenges.
Talk to Our Engineering Team