Tag Archives: cost savings

Berk Birand, Fero Labs

Is the Future of Food Quality in the Hands of Machine Learning?

By Maria Fontanazza
No Comments
Berk Birand, Fero Labs

Is the future of food quality in the hands of machine learning? It’s a provocative question, and one that does not have a simple answer. Truth be told, it’s not for every entity that produces food, but in a resource, finance and time-constrained environment, machine learning will absolutely play a role in the food safety arena.

“We live in a world where efficiency, cost savings and sustainability goals are interconnected,” says Berk Birand, founder and CEO of Fero Labs. “No longer do manufacturers have to juggle multiple priorities and make tough tradeoffs between quality and quantity. Rather, they can make one change that optimizes all of these variables at once with machine learning.” In a Q&A with Food Safety Tech, Birand briefly discusses how machine learning can benefit food companies from the standpoint of streamlining manufacturing processes and improve product quality.

Food Safety Tech: How does machine learning help food manufacturers maximize production without sacrificing quality?

Berk Birand: Machine learning can help food manufacturers boost volume and yield while also reducing quality issues waste, and cycle time. With a more efficient process powered by machine learning, they can churn out products faster without affecting quality.

Additionally, machine learning helps food producers manage raw material variation, which can cause low production volume. In the chemicals sector, a faulty batch of raw ingredients can be returned to the supplier for a refund; in food, however, the perishable nature of many food ingredients means that they must be used, regardless of any flaws. This makes it imperative to get the most out of each ingredient. A good machine learning solution will note those quality differences and recommend new parameters to deal with them.

FST: How does integrating machine learning into software predict quality violations in real-time, and thus help prevent them?

Birand: The power of machine learning can predict quality issues hours ahead of time and recommend the optimal settings to prevent future quality issues. The machine learning software analyzes all the data produced on the factory floor and “learns” how each factor, such as temperature or length of a certain process, affects the final quality.

By leveraging these learnings, the software can then help predict quality violations in real-time and tell engineers and operators how to prevent them, whether the solution is increasing the temperature or adding more of a specific ingredient.

FST: How does machine learning technology reveal & uphold sustainability improvements?

Birand: Due to the increase in climate change, sustainability continues to become a priority for many manufacturers. Explainable machine learning software can reveal where sustainability improvements, such as reducing heat or minimizing water consumption, can be made without any effect on quality or throughput. By tapping into these recommendations, factories can produce more food with the same amount of energy.

Paperstack

Taking Your Operations Digital? Bring in the Stakeholders Early

By Maria Fontanazza
No Comments
Paperstack

Going digital is a hot topic in the food industry, but making the investment can be a tough choice for organizations. Jeremy Schneider, business development director, food safety and quality assurance at Controlant, reviews some of the factors that food companies should consider when making the decision, along with the value that digital technologies can bring from the perspective of ROI and improving food safety culture.

Food Safety Tech: For businesses that have been historically paper-driven, where do they start on the technology adoption journey?

Jeremy Schneider, Controlant
Jeremy Schneider, business development director, food safety and quality assurance at Controlant

Schneider: There are a number of questions that firms, both small and large, should consider when deciding to move to a paperless operation. Have you considered what moving away from a paper-based system would mean for your enterprise? What are the perceived challenges to making this move? Or perhaps, what are the risks of not moving to digital? How would utilizing systems provide your organization with the ability to access data in transformative ways?

For organizations that are making the transition from paper documentation to digital, it is critical to develop a roadmap with tangible milestones and objectives. Although there are a variety of reasons to make the switch to digital, what is most important for your organization will determine what those are, as they will play a critical role in developing a roadmap of priorities. We often find that organizations identify a ‘’pain-point’’ in their current process, and this is a leading driver to wanting to make a change in their process. Perhaps this is the inability to easily access information in a timely manner, or the challenges with making sense of the data that you are currently collecting. Whatever your challenges may be, begin by developing a plan, and prioritize this, as it will provide you with early positive results that will keep you working towards the goal. As you experience these early benefits from going digital, you will begin to see the value that this will bring your organization at scale.

One significant issue that many organizations face when beginning this journey is not bringing the appropriate stakeholders into a program early enough. It is critical for the success of new supply chain programs to make sure you bring in members of purchasing, logistics, quality, finance, IT, and others as early as possible so that any questions or concerns are properly vetted early in the process. In addition to this, getting buy-in from these teams at the earliest phase of a project will allow others to vet the system in their own way, potentially helping them solve challenges they have been

FST: Talk about measuring the success of a technology: How do the metrics translate into ROI?

Schneider: A question that is often raised is how to measure the success of the technology. Simply put, does the program make your life easier and solve the problem you set out to, or not? Does it meet the concise objectives that you outlined in the beginning of the process, or does it fall short in some way? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, and it does meet the objectives, then you are well on your way to defining success of your program.

Read Food Safety Tech’s previous discussion with Schneider, Using Technology for Traceability Adds Dimension to Supply Chain, Promises ROIIt is critical that programs are able to show their value through their return on investment, but how do you measure this? If you have recently implemented a real-time supply chain temperature monitoring program, for instance, you may want to consider metrics such as reduced loss, spoilage, shortages, or restaurant-level outages as metrics of success. Or perhaps you would want to translate this into a dollar figure. For instance, in the previous year, your organization counted 10 rejected shipments due to suspected temperature abuse, at a loss of $500,000. In the year following your implementation, your new system was able to help the organization intervene and minimize that loss to just one rejected shipment at a cost of $50,000, thus leading to a reduced loss rate of $450,000.

In collaboration with other stakeholders in your organization, you may be able to identify additional metrics, such as reduced freight rates from optimized shipping lanes, reduced insurance premiums from reduced losses, or reduced quantities of on-hand inventories as you are able to truly manage a just-in-time supply chain. If your organization actively measures your Cost to Serve, savings within your supply chain would likely be an important data point to consider.
Beyond the identifiable money savings, consider some of the soft ROI attributes, such as enhanced collaboration with supply chain and supplier partners, improved customer loyalty, brand protection generally, and sustainability initiatives. Does your organization have goals to reduce food waste? If so, perhaps waste minimization is an important attribute to measure. When evaluated holistically, significant savings can be realized.

FST: How does technology facilitate a more effective food safety culture?

Schneider: Building an effective food safety culture is a process that requires commitment from every level of your organization. The ways that we promote food safety culture within each organization differs, from rewarding team members when they identify an unsafe practice, to actively promoting food safety throughout the organization, to encouraging quality assurance teams to identify state-of-the-art technologies and implementing them to improve the systems, programs, and processes throughout the company.

As food safety professionals, our toolboxes are filled with a variety of tools for the job, and technology as a tool is no exception. Technology should enable our organizations to be more efficient, allowing them to focus their attention on high-priority projects while minimizing work that can be automated. An example of this is setting parameters to allow organizations to work based on exception instead of requiring a review of all documentation.

As we enter the New Era of Smarter Food Safety, and the tenants of it being people-led, technology-enabled, and FSMA-based, we have a mandate to try new technologies to help solve previously unsolvable supply chain challenges. Organizations are actively pursuing real-time supply chain temperature monitoring as a way to provide insights into their cold chain and allowing them to move from reaction to a position of prevention.

Organizations are finding that investments in food safety technologies pay dividends in customer commitment over the long term. It is no longer acceptable to only meet regulatory standards. It is now an expectation that companies do anything possible within their power to assure customer safety and, per the FDA’s new mandate, to help create a more digital, traceable, and safer food system.

Mahni Ghorashi, Clear Labs
FST Soapbox

Why the Food Safety Industry Needs the Cloud

By Mahni Ghorashi
2 Comments
Mahni Ghorashi, Clear Labs

Cloud computing and storage, the breakthrough technology that once dominated headlines, conferences and CIOs’ strategic plans, is now commonplace in most industries. That is not to discount the journey it took to get here, though. This easy acceptance wasn’t always the case, and in fact, some of the world’s most important industries are lagging behind.

Food safety is one such industry that stands to gain the most from adopting cloud technology but continues to rely heavily on manual processes, paperwork, and cumbersome on-premise databases. These methods are seen as fail-safe, proven by history to be effective enough and compatible with the overarching goals of the industry. We’re suffering from the age-old adage: If it isn’t broken, we don’t need to fix it.

While the food safety industry has good reasons for taking a more conservative approach to new technology, I’d argue that the most pressing risk to our industry is the failure to invest in innovation. In our own attempts to avoid risk, we’re actually exposing ourselves to far greater losses both in protecting consumers and new opportunities.

A Path Forward For Food Safety

The food safety industry is changing, and changing rapidly. However, despite advances, the industry still faces major challenges. We’ve seen more than 200 recalls just this year. An average recall costs $10 million dollars in direct costs alone. On average, it takes 57 days to recall food, according to a report by the Office of Inspector General.

At the same time, we’re beginning to generate more data than ever, with technologies like blockchain and next-generation sequencing coming online in a big way. We’re about to experience a data explosion arguably bigger than in any other industry. A single NGS test can give industry officials hundreds of millions of data points per analysis, and routine pathogen tests are happening at high volumes around the clock.

This amount of data cannot be contained in the spreadsheets and on-premise databases of today.

The hesitation to adopt cloud-computing is not unfounded, given the initial fear around outages and security, and a disbelief that the technology could ever be as reliable and secure as their existing systems. And the hesitation is even more understandable when you consider that food and beverage is the third-most hacked industry. The damage from these breaches can be extensive, with reports that 70% of hacked food and beverage companies go out of business within a year of an attack. There is a substantial cost for lax security or prolonged outages.

Clearly, any solution has to be comprehensive, and our justifications for switching systems have to be all the more clear. But we cannot as an industry sit idle.

The food safety industry has an opportunity to learn from those who have gone before us and build a stronger, more robust cloud infrastructure.

We’re starting to see this shift take place – some of the top poultry manufacturers have already made the leap into cloud computing. They and others will prove that the value of making the move far outweighs the risk.

Quality Control and Consistency

Right now, it’s not uncommon for food safety employees to record their observations via paper and pencil. In a best-case scenario, these professionals are forced into spreadsheets with limited interoperability. In either scenario, there are huge amounts of friction when it comes to sharing information and, in fact, data can easily be lost as inboxes fill, software crashes, or papers get buried in the shuffle.

By enabling instantaneous data sharing, the cloud makes collaboration across an organization easily accessible for the first time. This, in turn, boosts productivity and also guarantees a higher degree of consistency in both process and results.

Employees can instantly share results, communicate across departments, and easily control permissions and access to information, allowing others to iterate on or apply their findings in real time.

Speed Across an Organization

The drive to increase efficiency actually underwrites the entire food safety industry. Experts are constantly asking how we can be faster at assessing risk, managing recalls, and generally running a business. These questions are only becoming more important as the threat of foodborne illness continues to rise.

The cloud enables greater speed in tracking food information inside and outside of the lab. Perhaps more than any other tool, cloud technology is going to allow the food safety industry to more quickly and effectively manage recalls.

Technology that allows companies to immediately update information company-wide without the burden or drag of an unwieldy IT infrastructure is valuable. Technology that gives you easily interpretable results, so that you can make quick decisions for the good of public health safety is valuable.

Cloud technology enables both. You could easily process terabytes worth of data and spit out easy, comprehensible results that would have otherwise taken days or weeks to produce.

This ability, which on its own is attractive, is especially important as you get into more complicated pathogen tests. For example, with traditional serotyping, a substantial portion of calls are subjective. The speed of cloud computing can take away some of that guesswork.

Dramatic Cost Savings

Not only does the cloud offer a faster system for storing and accessing information, but it also offers cheaper infrastructure, usually an offshoot of its speed. A survey of more than 1,000 IT professionals found that 88% of cloud users pointed to cost savings and 56% agreed that cloud services had helped them boost profits. Additionally, the absolute cost of the cloud is continuing to drop, improving margins.

With the cost savings enabled by the cloud, the food safety lab no longer has to stay a cost center. Adopting cloud technologies can create more wiggle room in a company’s budget and free up resources for ambitious experiments, new product development, and other activities that contribute to the bottom line of the organization.

Security and Regulatory Advancements

The cloud also allows companies to more easily cooperate with HAACP and FSMA regulations. With all of this organizational data easily available and updated in real time, organizations can ensure they’re keeping pace with regulatory requirements by easily producing traceability records and managing compliance requirements across multiple locations and vendors, for example.

While better, more transparent data management company-wide has always been the draw of cloud, the technology has been crippled by simultaneous concerns about security. Food safety executives feel stuck between wanting to comply with best practices and needing to protect sensitive and valuable information.

Fortunately, food safety has waited long enough. Even as recently as 2015, cloud breaches of major organizations’ databases were still making headlines. However, the technology has come a long way in a short time. Cloud providers are beginning to implement automatic checks of systems to analyze threats and identify their severity.

These advancements speak to the food safety industry’s primary pain points, security and speed. By solving for both, the cloud has reached a maturity worthy of the food safety industry.

The Future: Data Pollination

Finally, the cloud makes it much easier to share data across departments, organizations, and even entire industries.

We’re entering an era of data pollination. What I mean by that is there an opportunity to mesh food safety data (genomic data, label information, etc.) with other forms of data—human microbiome data, for instance, to create “personalized” food, enabling consumers to eat ideal foods based on their genetic makeup. While this trend has already taken off, it could be further improved and better validated by bringing food and genetic data out of their silos.

On the opposite end of the production line, data pollination could also help farmers, who have huge amounts of data at their fingertips, understand how they can play a larger role in food safety. If data can enable farmers to produce bigger yields, data can also certainly help farmers prevent any environmental causes of food safety on the farm itself.

Bringing together the data from the entire lifecycle of food—from farmer to consumer—can only be a good thing, powered by the cloud.

Conclusion

The food industry should not look at the task of updating their infrastructure to the cloud as a burden or an extra cost—it’s an investment and when done right, it can provide far greater returns. We have the advantage of late adoption and learning from the implementation mistakes and successes.

This isn’t just incremental improvement territory—we’re talking about making a quantum leap forward in our industry.