Tag Archives: supply chain visibility

By Paul Bradley

Across the food and beverage industry, organizations are undertaking a wide variety of data-oriented technology initiatives. There are a host of reasons for the trend, and indeed the convergence of multiple factors is likely behind the growing urgency for digitization within many food and beverage brands, manufacturers and supplier organizations. To be sure, ongoing supply chain instability over the last three or more years has put a focus on supply chain resilience and the need for more nimble and flexible supply networks. A dynamic and ever-changing global regulatory landscape is driving compliance and reporting requirements that are increasingly difficult to meet without a solid digital strategy in place. ESG initiatives are driving the need for increased visibility into global supply chains. Evolving consumer preferences create pressures on R&D organizations for continued product innovation, all of which needs to take place within acceptable safety, quality and risk management parameters. And of course, hovering over all of this is a tight (and increasingly costly) labor market, putting increased focus on opportunities for automation and increased efficiently.

Alongside these macro-level global trends, technology itself is moving forward at a rapid pace. The global food and beverage value chain has become more interconnected than ever before, with massive amounts of information moving around the world at remarkable speed. And of course, no discussion of technology is complete without a mention of artificial intelligence (AI). While by no means a new idea—many mature AI-based technologies have existed within the industry for years—AI is evolving quickly. Generative AI technologies, hardly known prior to 2023, are now appearing across the technology landscape, and dominating discussions around technology investment and strategy.

Confronted with all of this, food and beverage industry leaders could be forgiven for feeling a bit overwhelmed. Not only is more information (some valuable, some less so) available than ever before, but a profusion of technology solutions are vying for attention, nearly all promising new levels of insight and productivity. The landscape is complex, but there are a few basic steps that teams can take to help ensure that any potential technology investments are pointed in the right direction and are set up for long term success. Let’s examine five basic, but important steps that can help guide digitization efforts to a strong outcome.

1. Starting with the end in mind. The objective of a technology implementation should never be to implement a platform. Usually, technology investments start with a business problem that needs to be solved. For food safety teams, this can encompass a range of possibilities, from a desire to reduce error and gain efficiencies in processes, to a need for better real-time monitoring of processes already in place, to a desire to decrease global risk exposure in an increasingly diverse supplier environment. Whatever the situation, teams can substantially de-risk technology investments by being crystal clear on the business objectives (not simply the implementation goals) of a given initiative. Clearly defining a “north star” in terms of expected business outcomes, and revisiting those goals often, can help keep projects focused, and avoid costly missteps and poor prioritization decisions along the way.

2. Defining stakeholders. Though seemingly obvious, it can be surprisingly easy for teams to launch an initiative without a clear view of impacted stakeholders. Typically, a given technology solution will have relatively well-understood functional owners within an organization. But it’s equally important to understand downstream groups that may have to interact with the solution or its outputs. Direct users, too, are a stakeholder community that can easily be overlooked. A solution that does its job on paper but doesn’t align with the working conditions of an end-user community is going to run into challenges. External stakeholders may also need to be considered, as suppliers, customers, contract manufacturers and other entities can all become obstacles to program success if their buy-in hasn’t been considered early in the process.

3. Supplementing (vs. replacing) human intelligence. With all the buzz around AI, it’s easy to get excited about the longer-term possibilities of the technology. And that’s appropriate – AI has already had notable effects on industry technologies and will continue to do so in the years to come. But it’s equally important to consider the current state of generative AI solutions, and be realistic about the limitations and risks of the technology as it exists today. A useful framework for this approach can be to think in terms of how AI can help supplement, even maximize, the intelligence and expertise of human users. Can it consolidate data that would be cumbersome to organize and collate? Can it scan information and flag likely priorities for further investigation?

In the high-stakes environment of food safety and quality, the overlay of hard-earned human knowledge and awareness is going to remain necessary for a long time to come. At the same time, AI-based solutions are already present in the space, and those who use them wisely may very well realize a significant market advantage over those who shy away entirely.

4. Getting real about data quality. Whether the discussion is about AI, data insights, analytics, compliance reporting or automation, most technologies run on data. Put another way, most technologies aren’t any better than the data they consume. The ancient saying, “garbage in, garbage out” remains depressingly current, many decades after the dawn of computing. As a result, it’s important to take a hard look at the quality, completeness, consistency and structure of the information that a potential technology solution will need to access in order to deliver on its promise. On the positive side, qualified technology providers should be able to provide assistance and clear guidance through the data side of any implementation, and in an increasingly networked world, providers may even be able to come to the table with useful industry data and data management practices that make this part of the digitization journey easier and faster. But it’s important not to skip this step; many are the solutions that never lived up to their potential because the data they needed to consume wasn’t workable.

5. Lastly, as initiatives come together, it’s important to loop back to the original business objectives that were clarified in the first step. Have those objectives been met and, crucially, can that be measured? If it can, the project has likely succeeded, and is positioned to yield insights toward the next step in the technology journey.

The good news is that as digitization continues across the food and beverage industry, it creates a greater opportunity for brands, manufacturers and suppliers to move away from the antiquated model of static, linear supply chains, and toward a more interconnected future based both on shared data and shared values. Explore the world’s largest network of F&B brands and suppliers at TraceGains Gather™, and learn more about the growing community of committed safety professionals worldwide.

March 11, 2019

Markon Selects FoodLogiQ Product for Global Supply Chain Visibility

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FoodLogiQ has announced that Markon has selected its FoodLogiQ Connect Manage + Monitor product for global supply chain visibility and streamlined supplier management. “We vetted several systems providers and felt that FoodLogiQ was best positioned to help us manage data and dramatically increase efficiencies. With hundreds of suppliers, and thousands of farms, a robust system is necessary for us to maintain our industry-leading food programs,” said Markon President Tim York in a press release.

According to, managing hundreds of growers and dozens of processing plants is a massive undertaking that requires more than just manual tracking methods like spreadsheets and paper documents. Markon needed a technology solution to provide a global view of their supplier quality management, and they needed greater transparency across the company’s supply chain..

Markon will use the FoodLogiQ Connect’s Manage + Monitor to:

Centralize supplier documentation to achieve corporate food safety standards, implement corrective actions, support supplier verification, and manage required recordkeeping
Track and report on food safety across their supply chain and address issues with suppliers directly to drive compliance
Leverage data-driven reporting to help leadership make informed decisions about supplier performance and expiring documents

Read the full press release about Markon’s adoption of the FoodLogiQ platform.

Erin Mann, Food Protection and Defense Institute

November 7, 2017

FST Soapbox

Improving Food Supply Chain Resilience Through Proactive Identification Of Risks

By Erin Mann, MPH

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There was a time not long ago when most of the food Americans ate came from close to home. Consumers primarily ate what was in season and there were less processed and manufactured foods in general. That has all changed. Our world is more accessible, people are traveling more frequently, and as they do, they are also expanding their palates. Consumers can have Thai food for lunch, Ecuadorian for dinner, and enjoy fresh produce year round regardless of the growing season near home. Similar changes in diet and consumption patterns can be observed across the world. This global “shrinking” (globalization) demands longer and more complex food supply chains to move product and provide ingredients.

Attend the Food Safety Supply Chain Conference | June 12–13, 2018 | Rockville, MD | Learn moreTo support changes in consumer demands, food supply chains that support movement of ingredients and products from farm to fork are becoming increasingly global, dynamic and complex. These supply chains are comprised of complicated networks of farms, production or processing facilities, and storage and distribution channels with product moving via road, rail, ship and air across the globe. These supply chains provide the global food and agriculture sector with efficient access to suppliers and consumers around the world. Unfortunately, however, food supply chains are vulnerable to disruptions such as natural disasters, transportation hazards, cyber attacks, product contamination, theft and unexpected shutdowns of key supply chain nodes. Any of these disruptions could lead to significant public health and economic consequences.

Many supply chain risks and vulnerabilities are directly related to the way a supply chain is constructed. First, there are often several degrees of separation between the point of production and the source of raw ingredients with limited visibility of the pathways in between. Spices are an illustrative example of this supply chain challenge. Spice supply chains are notoriously long with product moving through a complex web of farmers, brokers, processors, wholesalers and exporters. By the time a spice reaches a manufacturer for use in a processed food product, the manufacturer may have adequate visibility and information only about the supplier from whom the spice was most immediately purchased. The manufacturer may not have good visibility of supply chain components further upstream. Depending on the nature of the manufacturer’s customers and distribution channels, the same manufacturer may also have limited visibility of downstream supply chain components. This limited visibility up and downstream could be true for every step of the chain. Without end-to-end supply chain visibility, stakeholders cannot adequately assess risks related to supplier quality and reliability. Tracing product forward and backwards becomes a very difficult task. In the event of a supply chain disruption or contamination event, limited supply chain visibility not only impedes mitigation and response efforts, but also exacerbates the event.

Second, supply chains are often constructed in such a way that certain components of the supply chain are more critical than others. For example, a supply chain may rely upon a single manufacturing plant through which all ingredients and all finished product are routed; a shutdown or failure at that point in the supply chain would greatly impact normal operations. Likewise, a supply chain may rely exclusively on a particular transportation route; a disruption to that route from a disaster could significantly delay delivery of product to consumers. A supply chain may also source the majority of a raw ingredient from a single supplier; a disruption to that supplier could force a producer to scramble to identify and vet alternative suppliers.

CRISTAL (Criticality Spatial Analysis). Photo: Food Protection and Defense Institute

Forward-thinking approaches are needed to address supply chain challenges related to supply chain complexity and poor visibility. While some supply chain risks cannot be avoided entirely, understanding supply chain structure and proactively identifying supply chain hazards based on the structure of the supply chain will ultimately improve supply chain resilience. For example, end-to-end, geo-spatial mapping of the supply chain of a particular product line would allow stakeholders to identify risks such as exclusive reliance upon a single supply chain node. However, such an approach is not easy. End-to-end geo-spatial mapping of a supply chain requires data and information from multiple stakeholders. Sharing information across organizations is both culturally and logistically difficult.

To address these challenges, the Food Protection and Defense Institute (FPDI) has developed technology that allows private food companies and the government to document, visualize and compare supply chains in support of risk and criticality assessments, mitigation efforts and event response. With support from the Department of Homeland Security, FPDI developed CRISTAL or Criticality Spatial Analysis. CRISTAL is a geo-spatial web application that allows organizations to document supply chains from end-to-end, including supply chain components owned by other entities such as suppliers or distributors. Additionally, CRISTAL allows users to visualize the geo-spatial structure of a supply chain alongside hazard layer data, including cargo theft and natural disaster hazards. By increasing supply chain visibility, CRISTAL ultimately facilitates supply chain documentation, product tracing, and event response. Finally, CRISTAL supports efforts to identify where mitigation resources are most needed during potentially catastrophic supply-chain failures.

More information about the CRISTAL technology is available on the FPDI website. Organizations interested in using the technology may contact FPDI at fpdi@umn.edu.

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