The content of this article was taken from “Supply Chain Solutions: The Quest for Safer Food,” a keynote address given by RizePoint CTO, Jesse Dowdle, on Sept. 5 at the 2018 Retail Foodservice Summit in Chicago.
Modern supply chains are facing more complex challenges than ever before, and all signs point to the continuation of increased complexity. The farm-to-fork process often involves many suppliers for one product, and each material has many stops in processing, distribution, transportation, retail, and more.
It can be argued that the tools for managing supply chain complexity have not kept up with demand. Many companies still rely on manual processes that may even involve pen and paper and basic spreadsheets. The great news is that there are already tools in place, and greater technological developments on the horizon, that offer proactive strategies for supply chain managers to find success while supplying safer food to customers.
Let’s break down the top three supply chain challenges in food service, how you can start solving them today, and what to prepare for in the future.
Modern Supply Chain Challenges
Truthfully, modern supply chain challenges are similar to many challenges of the past. The difference is that the sheer volume and speed of global food production and distribution have complicated those problems, so it’s increasingly important to rethink and modernize our solutions.
Challenge 1: Transparency
Transparency comes in two forms: transparency for stakeholders within your business and transparency for consumers. With so many steps, processes, people, and documents involved internally, the waters of transparency often feel anything but. Working toward better transparency is key to spotting issues early — such as unsafe facilities, supplier noncompliance, fraudulent ingredients, and undeclared allergens — and acting fast to correct them before they become bigger problems.
Consumers are also demanding more transparency from food brands, both in terms of quality and corporate social responsibility. And with the wide accessibility of social media platforms, it’s easy for even one negative comment to start damaging your brand.
Challenge 2: Traceability
Every stop, quality check, and physical interaction with your products offers potential for issues, which means you have to record each data point to keep every ingredient in your food products traceable. That’s a lot of data to keep track of.
Manual processes make it difficult to find the source of food safety issues and recalls, which complicates any effort to correct the root cause of food safety issues. Additionally, consumers have more interest in food provenance outside of recalls, and some companies are even beginning to list food origins on their packaging.
Challenge 3: Supplier Quality
There’s a renewed focus on holding suppliers accountable for the materials they provide. Historically companies may not have been required to know how a material gets to their doorstep as long as it arrived on time. Now companies need to know that each supplier is following government regulations, ethical practices, and brand standards. In other words, food brands need to tie quality compliance that happens “outside the building” to quality control that happens “inside the building .”
Current Supply Chain Solutions
The overarching theme for modern supply chain solutions can be distilled to one word: technology. The more you can integrate your quality processes with technology, the more you can gain an edge in the competitive world of food service. Using a quality management software (QMS) is a perfect first step, but there are key technologies within a robust QMS that can change your food service quality success now and set you up for even more success in the future.
Machine Learning
The continued development of machine learning through artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly important to food service and food safety. Imagine a world where AI has learned so much about your business and processes that it can predict noncompliance and even recalls. It’s the same predictive response technology that fills up your Netflix and Amazon accounts with personalized suggestions. The more you can enlist the help of technology to predict outcomes, the more you can gain a proactive edge as you manage your food-related quality programs.
Open APIs
If you need to get the most out of a QMS, it’s important to think about the software as an integration point for all your quality data, not just a tool for gathering quality data from inside the building. This means the most robust QMS will have open APIs so you can import data from all your sources, including customer feedback, supplier compliance, company documents and reports, and information gleaned from integrating your internet of things. This creates a single source of truth that can ultimately help you spot trends and drive improvement.
Future Supply Chain Solutions
A little forward thinking goes a long way as you build processes that will support your quality programs for years to come. The future of solving modern supply chain challenges is currently developing between two main categories: continued development of blockchain technology and investment in supplier reputation.
Blockchain and Supply Chain
Blockchain tech is most popular within the cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, but it has many more applications. The tech behind blockchain is also an incredible fit to solve many traceability challenges, which in turn helps solve transparency and supplier quality challenges.
The idea behind blockchain is connecting related information and “locking” it together so it’s difficult for any single person to alter the information through human error or bad actors. It takes the difficult task of manual traceability and makes a data “breadcrumb” trail that can lead right to a point of origin for contamination or other food safety issues. A process that might require days to find a root cause could essentially turn into a task requiring just a few minutes.
Blockchain and Supplier Quality
Another exciting potential that comes with blockchain is helping the food safety community build open networks of reputable suppliers that meet specific quality standards. In essence, it has the potential to build up industry-wide supplier transparency, which would both help individual businesses find the qualified suppliers they need and improve the food safety industry as a whole.
Strengthen your supply chain and quality programs with a QMS that’s customizable to your existing processes. RizePoint’s quality management software can help you manage and integrate all your quality data and help you deliver meaningful reporting that drives improvement to ultimately help you keep brand promises.