Many of food affair which lowered the consumer protection and the trust of the consumer in the products happened in the last years. Reaction of the European legislator was remitting many regulations among others Regulations No. 178/2002 or 1935/2004 which put the product security and food legislation throughout Europe on the same base. The requirement should guarantee the full traceability of food demanding from each stage of supply chain marking of products and collecting data about the products. In this way tracking and tracing of food from the producers to industry and logistic services to final costumers will be possibly. One of the stage of the food supply chain is wholesale market which is used in this article as an example. The EAN Standard and EAN codes which help to fulfill the requirement of the European Parliament (178/2002) are the main focus. It will be shown what profits give the EAN code and how import this is for us, final costumers.
A comparison between cardboard and plastic boxes for apple packaging in the wholesale and retail trade has been drawn using the SimaPro programme for life cycle analysis. The environmental impact of using plastic cases was estimated much lower, mainly thanks to their repeated use.
Data Envelopment Analysis is one of the quantitative methods in economics used more broadly during last years. This is nonparametric method which allows to make an estimation of the efficiency of the organization without having financial data. Authors decided to use this method for validation of the efficiency of the Polish wholesale markets. The National Development Program of the Wholesale Markets expected that all markets will have the same possibility to be efficient. It seems that the development of wholesale markets is varying. To check this hipotheses authors have chosen as an input: area, building area while as an output have been chosen: sales volume per year in tones, the number of traders and the number of producers.