Delight Your Consumers with Safe, Trusted, and Sustainable Products.

CHALLENGE

The task of managing food safety and quality is becoming more complicated. Between supply chain disruption, increased rate of innovation in the industry, and the need to maintain knowledge bases within the company, food and beverage organizations need ever-increasing agility. An increased reliance on suppliers and external manufacturers has made maintaining a culture of food safety along their manufacturing more challenging while expanding product portfolios put further strain on limited food safety and quality resources.

Companies lack a unified view of all the data in the context of business operations and a structured process for communicating and sharing data with suppliers and external partners. Current systems are often fragmented, disjointed, not connected and not able to capture both food safety as well as quality events in the same system. With an inability to capture patterns in the data scattered across these various systems F&B organizations are unable to move from a reactive to a proactive management of their food safety and quality.

Read the Unified Food Safety and Quality Management: Briefing »

CHALLENGE

HACCP (hazard analysis and critical points) is a systematic preventive approach to food safety, controlling biological, chemical, physical, and allergen hazards that can cause the product to be unsafe by designing measures to control these hazards at safe levels.

Large food & beverage companies with complex product portfolios and large numbers of manufacturing facilities need to manage the deployment of HACCP efficiently and effectively across a variety of products and geographies. Effective sharing of knowledge from central experts to the factory floor is essential to ensure that control measures are deployed consistently to safeguard consumers.

In many F&B companies, HACCP studies are derived from disjointed database systems providing hazard information and are maintained in spreadsheets and documents, often relying on human action to keep all system in-sync and up to date. In today's increasingly disruptive business environment, your organization will struggle to sufficiently solve this using non-scalable solutions and often unstructured data.

Watch The Digital HACCP Demo » | Read Our HACCP Use Case Brief »

CHALLENGE

Certificates of Analysis are the most frequently exchanged quality documents between manufacturers and suppliers. Recipients typically don't trust CoAs at face value, requiring a labor-intensive manual verification process. Verification is important to ensure that delivered materials are meeting the agreed upon specifications.

Given the perishable nature of many food ingredients, the F&B industry relies on frequent delivery of materials for effective manufacturing, resulting in high volume of CoAs being exchanged. For an enterprise-sized organization, the effort involved in manually verifying these documents is in the range of 75 FTEs per million CoAs.

CHALLENGE

The fragmented and diverse supply base in the Food & Beverage industry poses challenges for F&B companies in managing supply chain risks, necessitating data-driven risk management for food supply chains due to factors like climate change, political instability, and changing consumer habits. Food & Beverage organizations rely on their suppliers to manage their food safety by ensuring that the materials they are supplying are safe and that their food safety processes are effectively managed. Most organizations are using standard digital tools such as email, spreadsheets, and shared drives to organize and communicate their requirements to their supply networks, making response times slow when speed is needed most. Supplier audits or assessments by F&B organizations typically reside in a separate system or approach, making it sometimes difficult to manage the supplier authorization process without substantial manual rework. To shift from a reactive to a proactive approach, more timely information on hazards and risks is required.

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CHALLENGE

Increasingly, food and beverage companies must be constantly "audit ready", ensuring compliance with industry and customer audit standards. Failure of a third-party or customer audit presents a serious risk to business operations and critically damage customer and consumer trust in an organization's food safety practices. To manage this risk and be audit ready, food and beverage companies have to devote a large amount of resources and time to regularly conduct internal audits and self assessments. These often cover an ever increasing number of food safety requirements across their manufacturing facilities and supply base using processes that are mostly reliant on spreadsheets and documents to report audit results and identify critical food safety gaps.

CHALLENGE

Advertising and product claims are critically important to food & beverage companies, helping to define functional product benefits, differentiate from the competition, support brands and perhaps most importantly build trust with consumers. Current trends related to functional ingredients, health claims, sustainability, and accelerated product launch cycles are requiring even more urgency around efficient and effective claims management. However, the process of developing claims, substantiating, adapting to local markets, and monitoring usage is complex, involves multiple stakeholders, and can involve significant regulatory and legal risk. Many companies today use disparate, manual systems such as spreadsheets, file share folders, and email to manage their claims process. There’s often no single source of truth for approved claims, and comments and approvals get lost in long email chains.

CHALLENGE

Consumers increasingly demand that companies be vocal and transparent about what they do to address sustainability and ESG concerns and how their products are being developed and sourced. While regulations are spotty, the rate at which they are being implemented across the globe is increasing. Food & beverage companies are in many ways at the center of the sustainability challenge, as ingredients can often negatively impact the environment from which they are sourced, and the long-term impact of packaging is a constant source of concern. In addition, sustainability and ESG data and documentation up and down the value chain is often difficult to obtain, track and manage due to the many disparate and siloed systems used today.