Tag Archives: digital maturity

“Positive ROI” Is Not a Number

By David Hatch
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Ask a food safety director whether the new system paid off, and you will hear about audit readiness, faster CAPA closure and the recall that never happened. Ask the CFO the same question, and you will get a different question back: how much? Both answers are sincere. They just aren’t the same answer. And the gap between them may be why so many food safety technology business cases die in the budget meeting.

The 2026 Food Safety Digital Maturity Benchmark surveyed 290 qualified food manufacturers on what they have deployed, what they set out to achieve and what they got back. For this article, Food Safety Tech Research (FSTR) went back into the raw responses and cross-tabulated the ROI question against everything else respondents told us. None of the cross-tabulations described in this article have been published before.

The ROI that isn’t

Let’s start with the good news: 72% of respondents say their digital food safety investment has produced a positive return: 30% call it strong and 42% call it moderate. The ‘moderate’ answer choice reads “benefits have somewhat exceeded costs,” and it is the single most popular answer in the survey. But that isn’t necessarily an ROI. It’s a mood.

Then there is everyone else. 80 of the 290 companies, or 28%, cannot say their technology has paid for itself. 12% call it break-even, 8% say it is too early to tell, 4% have not tried to quantify it, and 3% admit it lost money.

The more revealing number is hiding inside the optimists. Of the 210 companies that report a positive ROI, 160, or 76%, did not report an improvement in cost of poor quality. That is the one KPI on the list that is literally measured in dollars. More than a third of the optimists (35%) report no improvement in scrap, downtime or cost of poor quality at all. While the return may feel “real” from a food safety team KPI standpoint, it just doesn’t show up anywhere a controller would look for it.

Across all 290 companies, the KPI most often reported as improved is audit scores (45%). Cost of poor quality ranks 11th of 12 (22%). The industry has optimized its technology for the auditor, not the CFO, and this is a real problem when it comes to justifying spend on new innovative tech.

And don’t think that the CFO doesn’t notice. Among companies reporting strong ROI, 82% say senior management fully supports digital investment. Among companies that call it too early to tell or haven’t quantified it, that figure falls to 17%.

Same mission, different scorecard

Food safety leaders and business leaders agree on the mission. About half of each group lists preventing contamination events as an investment objective. Where they part ways is the scorecard.

Compare the 94 respondents in food safety and quality leadership with the 42 executives and general managers who responded to the survey:

  • Budget: 52% of executives call budget a barrier to digital investment, versus 31% of food safety leaders.
  • Cost: 57% of executives set reducing scrap, waste and cost of poor quality as an objective, versus 38% of food safety leaders.
  • Compliance: 44% of food safety leaders cite regulatory compliance as a driver, versus 29% of executives. (42% set GFSI certification as an objective, versus 26%).

The executive sample is small, so treat everything except the budget gap as “directionally significant”. But the direction is hard to miss. One side is buying insurance against a bad day. The other side is reading the invoice.

Here is where it gets uncomfortable. Business framing gets business results. Companies that cite at least one business driver (reducing waste, improving uptime, cutting labor costs or competitive differentiation) were roughly twice as likely to report improvement in a hard-dollar KPI: 67% versus 34%. Companies that set a scrap or cost objective: 71% versus 51%.

One more twist, before anyone blames the food safety department. When a VP or director of food safety or quality owns the investment decision, 83% of companies report a positive ROI, versus 68% when someone else owns it. That holds even when the person answering the survey isn’t in food safety (85% versus 69%). Those companies also report full senior management support more often (72% versus 58%).

Decisions made by cross-functional steering committees fare worst: only 55% report a positive return. Food safety leadership isn’t the problem. Translating its value into the CFO’s language is.

Misery has company

If it helps, food safety, or the food and beverage industry in general is not the only function struggling to put a number on the value of its technology investments.

  • Deloitte: close to home, Deloitte’s 2025 Smart Manufacturing Survey of 600 manufacturing executives reported output gains of 10% to 20%. Yet only 42% said they were developing value targets and a measurement plan to assess progress.
  • IBM: IBM’s 2025 CEO Study surveyed 2,000 CEOs across 24 industries. They reported that only 25% of AI initiatives had delivered their expected ROI, and 64% admitted that fear of falling behind drives investment before they clearly understand the value.

Next to these cohorts, food safety looks like a star: 72% positive ROI. But notice the difference in the question. IBM asked whether initiatives met expected ROI. Deloitte asked about gains and KPIs. Our survey asked whether benefits exceeded costs and let respondents decide what counted as a benefit. Either food safety is the most ROI-efficient function in global industry, or it is grading on a curve. The cost-of-poor-quality numbers suggest the curve.

How to stop grading on a curve

None of this means food safety technology doesn’t pay. It means the industry is bad at proving that it does. The fix is less about technology than about bookkeeping.

  1. Baseline before you buy. Record the cost of poor quality, scrap, downtime and hold-and-release times before the system goes live. You can’t show an improvement against a number nobody wrote down.
  2. Translate prevention into dollars. “We avoided a recall” is a story. Your own cost of a hold, a write-off or a customer chargeback is a number. Finance will accept a conservative estimate with a source over an inspiring story without one.
  3. Retire qualified metrics from your vocabulary. Report a figure, even a range, with its assumptions in plain sight. A business case with a range invites a conversation. A business case with an adjective invites a no.
  4. Give the investment one owner who keeps two scorecards. The data favors food safety ownership over committees. But that owner needs to report the CFO’s metrics alongside the auditor’s.

The food safety function has spent decades learning to prove a negative: the outbreak that didn’t happen. That is hard, valuable work. The next step is learning to prove a positive, in dollars, to the people who sign the checks. Until then, “somewhat exceeded costs” will keep getting what it deserves: somewhat of a budget.

About the data

The 2026 Food Safety Digital Maturity Benchmark surveyed 290 qualified food and beverage manufacturers between July 22 and September 16, 2026. All benchmark figures are self-reported. The cross-tabulations in this article are original FSTR analysis of the qualified survey responses and have not been published before. Differences described as significant were tested with Fisher’s exact test at p<0.05; others are directional.

Sources

The Food Safety Digital Maturity Benchmark findings report can be downloaded from the Food Safety Tech Research (FSTR) site: https://foodsafetytech.com/research/contact-2/

Food Safety Tech Research Completes Inaugural Digital Maturity Benchmark, Finds Full Digital Integration Remains Rare

By Food Safety Tech Staff
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Food Safety Tech Research (FSTR) announced initial findings from its inaugural Food Safety Digital Maturity Benchmark, the first independent study linking digital maturity in food safety operations to measurable performance and ROI. The study surveyed 290 qualified food manufacturing companies against a five stage maturity model combining self-assessment with verified technology adoption and performance data.

The findings are stark. Just 3.4% of the industry has reached full digital integration; most manufacturers remain in the middle of the journey. Every food safety objective measured, from CAPA cycle time to audit readiness, climbed consistently with maturity, and organizations further along the curve are 2.6 times more likely to report strong, quantified ROI.

“This data replaces assumption with evidence,” said David Hatch, Co-Founder and Chief Research Officer of FSTR. “Food companies can learn what separates high performers from the rest, and the paths available for improvement. Solution providers get proof of what actually drives outcomes, and align their product strategies and innovation plans more effectively.”

“The industry has never had a study like this,” said Rick Biros, Founder and President of Innovative Publishing and FSTR Co-Founder. “It provides a roadmap for tech investment based on outcomes instead of marketing hype or perception.”

FSTR will unveil the full findings, plus dedicated ROI and AI adoption analyses, in a working session at the Food Safety Consortium in Washington, D.C., October 21 to 23.

The full findings report will be made available to survey respondents, conference attendees, and via FSTR Advisory Membership. Details are available at foodsafetytech.com/research.

Steven Sklare, Food Safety Academy
FST Soapbox

What Is Your Company’s Level of Digital Risk Maturity?

By Steven Sklare
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Steven Sklare, Food Safety Academy

The digital transformation of food safety management programs is a common topic of discussion today, across the full range of media including print, blogs, websites and conferences. It has also been generally acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly accelerated the adoption of various digital technologies. However, let’s be clear, COVID-19 may have accelerated the process, but the process was under way as the only way for food companies to efficiently cope with the increase of required compliance documentation for regulatory bodies, such as FDA, USDA, etc., non-regulatory organizations such as GFSI, and customer specific requirements. COVID-19 has added a sense of urgency, as the fragility of both domestic and international supply chains has been exposed with long-term sources of ingredients or equipment being cut off overnight. We must also overlay the need to manage food safety risk and food fraud vulnerability in real time (or even predict the future, which will be discussed further in a future article). The food industry has also had to adjust to dealing with many aspects of work and production without typical face-to-face interaction—a norm of operating within the environment of a global pandemic over the past two years.

What is not clear, however, is the meaning of “digital transformation” or the “digitization” of a food safety management program. What is not clear is what these terms mean to individual organizations. The frenzy of buzzwords, “urgent” presentations, blogs and webinars help to create an improved level of awareness but rarely result in concrete actions that lead to improved results. I admit to being guilty of this very hyperbole—in a previous article discussing “Chocolate and Big Data”, I said, “If a food organization is going to effectively protect the public’s health, protect their brand and comply with various governmental regulations and non-governmental standards such as GFSI, horizon scanning, along with the use of food safety intelligent digital tools, needs to be incorporated into food company’s core FSQA program.” Sounds great, but it presupposes a high level of awareness of those “digital tools”. What is not clear to many organizations is how to get started and how to create a road map that leads to improved results, more efficient operations and importantly, to ongoing improvement in the production of safe food.

Addressing a new concept can be intimidating and paralyzing. Think back to the beginning days of HACCP, then TACCP, then VACCP, and post FSMA, preventive controls! So, where do we start?

Nikos Manouselis, CEO of Agroknow, a food safety data and intelligence company with a cloud-based risk intelligence platform, Foodakai, believes the place to start is for food companies to perform an honest, self-assessment of their digital risk maturity. Think of it as a digital risk maturity gap analysis. While there are certainly different approaches to performing this self-assessment, Agroknow has developed a simple, straightforward series of questions that focus on three critical areas: Risk monitoring practices and tools; risk assessment practices and tools; and risk prevention practices and tools. The questions within each of these areas lead to a ranking of 1–5 with 1 being a low level of maturity and 5 being a high level of maturity. One of the goals of the self-assessment is to determine where your company stands, right now, compared to where you want to be or should be.

While this is not a complete nor exhaustive process, it helps to break the inertia that could be holding a company back from starting the process of digitizing their food protection and quality systems, which will allow them to take advantage of the benefits available from continuous monitoring of food safety risks and food fraud vulnerabilities, artificial intelligence and predictive analytics.