There is no question that we are in the midst of a unique time period in history. Technology is continuing to innovate at an increasingly rapid rate, which has led to drastic changes that affect nearly every corner of day-to-day life. From the way we find information to our food choices, technology is influencing our lives in new ways.
The Rise of the Internet
Mary Meeker, the venture capitalist who was dubbed the “Queen of the Internet” more than 15 years ago, has described the current Internet age as a period of reimagining. At the heart of this reimagining has been the rapid growth, maturity and adoption of the Internet and Internet-enabled technologies.
In her most recent 2015 research, Meeker published some fascinating statistics. The number of people online has ballooned more 80 times, from a user base of a mere 35 million in 1995 to a staggering 2.8 billion users in less than 20 years. This figure translates into nearly 40% of the total global population.
A breakdown of the 2.8 billion Internet users in 2014. This figure (39% global penetration) exploded from the approximately 35 million users in 1995. Source: Internet Trends 2015 – Code Conference
It hasn’t just been the volume of usage that has evolved radically. The nature by which those billions of users are signing online has also changed. It’s hard to believe that the original iPhone was released in 2007, less than 10 years ago. In that time, the mobile Internet has gone from a novelty to a necessity for many of us in our daily lives. This smartphone adoption has fueled Internet use and has drastically increased the ease with which consumers can get online.
Reimagining Communication and Compliance
The result of our new “always-on,” globally connected world (to borrow Meeker’s term) is a complete reimagining of communication. Consumers expect a velocity and volume of communication that the world has never before experienced. We now take for granted that we can reach friends, family and acquaintances anywhere in the world—at any time—in an instant. This has also drastically changed our expectations of business relationships.
Consumers in an ever-connected world have an expectation of availability and transparency of information from the brands with which they interact and the establishments they frequent. What this means for businesses is that customers expect to have a degree of access to business data that they’ve never asked for previously.
A tangible side effect of this desire for data transparency can be seen within the regulatory environment that organizations operate. Governments and regulatory bodies have increased their expectations of data access and availability over time, resulting in more stringent regulations across the board.
Research from Enhesa shows that the regulatory growth rate is nearly as staggering as Internet growth rates. According to the firm’s research, from 2007–2014 regulatory increases by region were as follows:
North America: +146%
Europe: +206%
Asia: +104%
Impact on Food Safety: Consumer Engagement and Regulatory Growth
One particular area of regulatory growth has occurred within the food and beverage sector. Arguably no product category has a more direct impact on consumers than food, as it literally fuels us each day. It’s no wonder that in an environment of increasing regulations and more empowered consumers that food quality and food safety are under increased scrutiny.
In today’s environment, it becomes much more challenging to brush aside product recalls and food safety incidents or bury these stories in specialized media. The latest news is not just a fleeting negative headline. In a worst-case scenario these incidents are viral, voracious and more shareable than ever before. From Listeria outbreaks to contaminated meat to questionable farming practices—when fueled by the Internet, the negative branding impact of these stories can be staggering. Consumers are paying attention and engaging with these stories—for example, during a Listeria or Salmonella outbreak, online searches for these terms significantly rise.
The rise of hyper-aware consumers has had a measurable impact. As a result, governments have been quick to respond and have beefed up existing regulations for the food and beverage sector via FSMA and GFSI.
The new FSMA regulations are primarily intended to enhance the protection of public health through promotion of adopting a modern, preventive and risk-based approach to food safety regulation. The general consensus industry-wide is that the new regulations will increase the capacity of firms in the industry to develop effective food safety management system at facility levels that will be effective in preventing distribution of food-related hazards to the general public, which may result in foodborne illness.
There is widespread consensus that the development and implementation of a food safety system whose primary purpose is to prevent the distribution of hazardous product to the general public and hence prevent or reduce foodborne illness is a much more effective and practical approach towards this end. This is especially the case when compared to past approaches, among which many programs were quality control based and focused on end-product testing given the highly fluid and dynamic complexity in the food industry, which is being fueled by technological advancements that occur at the speed of light.
Having stated consumer safety as the primary stakeholder of a facility’s food safety system, there are other secondary stakeholders whose requirements are subservient to the consumer’s health requirements, but they play key roles in determining the architectural structure of the food safety system:
Regulatory requirements. Primarily serve the public and act on its behalf in ensuring that all food products distributed in the market are safe for consumption. However, the regulatory requirements have their own innate requirements (i.e., the uniformity of the structure of a food safety system) at the most basic level for the purposes of compliance, which enables a harmonized structure that conveniently lends itself to a uniform approach in the inspection of facilities by FDA agents.
Organizational requirements. There are existential risks to an organization should a facility ship out contaminated product, as can be seen from the recent cases widely reported by the media. These range from market share reductions to rattled shareholders, and to employees, it becomes a job security issue. In fact, this is one of the key points I always bring out during trainings: The consumer is the ultimate boss, and if the consumer complains, it’s bad for our jobs as food manufacturers. If they are outright sickened/angry/mad by our job performance, we should expect the pink slips (I’m sure a number of employees at the Blue Bell Creameries will support this opinion).
From a regulatory requirement perspective, uniformity is a key aspect of the requirements, as can be inferred from regulatory text on the preventive rules, which describe the fundamental elements that must be implemented by a facility in order for it to be compliant with FDA registration. The lifecycle of regulatory requirements are long term—the last time comprehensive changes were conducted on cGMPs was in the mid-1980s. And hence the analytical/reductionist approach of focusing on food safety at the facility level is complementary to its enforcement strategy (i.e., facility-based registration and inspection).
From the organizational perspective, given that the food safety system serves an existential purpose to the business, organizations are leveraging the best available resources to endure its proper design and implementation, including employing the use of the latest available technologies. From the organizational perspective, the organizational requirements are highly dynamic and often tied to consumer and market trends. And as such in most corporate organizations, the food safety system adopts a holistic approach, whereby plant facility food safety systems are often nested within larger hierarchical corporate food safety systems. One of the fundamental reasons for this holistic set up is to enhance efficiency of these programs, especially given their key functional roles in mitigating or preventing organizational risks that may be presented through distribution of contaminated product.
It’s safe to say that 2015 has been one of the worst years in recent history when it comes to food contamination. Everyone from global food manufacturers to major restaurant chains and grocery stores perpetuated or experienced outbreaks of foodborne illnesses like E. coli, Listeria, Salmonella and Norovirus. From farm to fork, the food industry needs to evalutate and improve its processes to deliver the utmost health and safety to consumers.
With FSMA and tougher industry standards in place, there will be much more emphasis on preventative measures—especially for food manufacturers. FSMA establishes a legislative mandate to require comprehensive, prevention-based controls across the food supply to prevent or significantly minimize the likelihood of problems occurring.
Not surprisingly, most food manufacturers say they are being impacted by FSMA
Even though most of the regulations affiliated with the FSMA have just gone into effect, or will go into effect in 2016, food manufacturers are already feeling the heat. A recent survey found that the majority (81%) of food manufacturers are experiencing some level of impact from current and impending regulations. Processes pertaining to traceability, supplier and facility audits, HACCP and product recalls are causing the most concern. While most food manufacturers support FSMA’s mission to put prevention at the forefront, the reality is that many aren’t equipped to handle growing compliance demands.
There are still a sizeable number of food manufacturers that manually record their processes for identifying, evaluating and controlling food safety hazards. In fact, more than 30% of food manufacturers document their HACCP plan in this manner.
58% of manufacturers surveyed are using an in-house system for recording issues as part of their HACCP plan
With FSMA, there isn’t any room for human error. Although technology with track and trace capabilities has been available long before FSMA came into play, obstacles such as complicated interfaces, lack of interoperability and resources deterred wide-spread adoption among food manufacturers. The tide is changing here. Advanced enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions have built in track and trace functionality that is more intuitive and integrates seamlessly with vital manufacturing execution systems (MES).
Manufacturing execution solutions play a key in helping companies achieve traceability. All figures courtesy of Aptean. View full infographic
Although the FDA does not have the legal authority to require companies to use computerized traceability solutions, implementing track and trace technology is one of the most effective measures a food manufacturer can take when it comes to FSMA compliance. It can help create a more systematic and reliable account throughout the lifecycle of a food product, and also establish preventative measures, including automated product checkpoints and quality tests throughout the supply chain. Ultimately, this gives food manufacturers the opportunity to identify and prevent issues before they become epidemics.
In addition to taking strong measures to prevent contamination, under FSMA the FDA now has authority to initiate mandatory recalls. Although mandatory recalls are anticipated to be rare, food manufacturers should use track and trace technology to make recall preparation routine. When used properly, these tools can pinpoint specifics about a product in real time, streamline quality reporting, and launch mock recalls.
Of course, technology is not only the vessel for improvement—to actually see change, food manufacturers need to take a critical look at their processes and make adjustments. Automating poor processes will only accelerate poor results, therefore approaching FSMA compliance and implementing track and trace technology requires time and strategy.
Ultimately, your company’s reputation is on the line as well as the safety of consumers. Dedicating necessary resources toward compliance planning and technology implementation is always well worth the investment. Many of the companies and suppliers that were in this year’s spotlight for contamination will look back on 2015 with regret because safety wasn’t at the forefront. Let’s learn from the hard lessons they provided and make 2016 the year that food manufacturers win back consumer trust and focus on quality.
News concerning the safety of food seems to be everywhere these days. On a daily basis there’s a story about a salmonella outbreak or a company initiating a product recall due to possible contamination. Why is this the case?
If you visit most food businesses, whether it’s a restaurant, grocery store, manufacturer or foodservice operator, chances are you’ll see the same thing: Employees using pen and paper checklists, forms and log books to manage their food safety operations.
The recent E. coli outbreak traced to Chipotle Mexican Grill infected more than 50 people and led the company to shut down several restaurants. The outbreak was also a PR disaster for the company and damaged its reputation as a reliable provider of safe meals. Chipotle lost out on potential revenue and probably spent a good amount of money on hiring outside food safety consultants to examine its safety standards.
Since starting the business, Chipotle has remained focused on a core mission: Make great-tasting food, and more recently, food that is not modified with GMOs. While its goal has not changed, running a food company is vastly different today than in the past.
Modern Food Safety Isn’t So Modern
For one thing, there is a lot more paper to manage in today’s world. Between time and temperature controls, HACCP and HARPC requirements, and a whole host of industry certifications and brand standards, food businesses implement several safety processes. Even with advancements in technology, food safety operations are often run manually and therefore are error-prone.
In the early 1990s, food companies could handle the volume of paperwork themselves. Today, they’re swamped. Visit a food business, and you’ll see the same thing everywhere: Stacks of documents that need to be typed up and sent to food agencies. As one quality assurance manager recently stated, “We can barely keep track of them all.”
Surrounded by stacks of paper in their office, quality assurance (QA) managers explain that much of the pileup is due to more rules and regulations related to food safety. Food companies must comply with a growing number of local, state and federal laws that regulate food safety. The focus of recent laws such as FSMA is toward prevention of foodborne illness, placing even more emphasis on internal audits and recordkeeping. In addition to these laws, food companies must compete with the wealth of information available to customers about how their food safety operations work. Especially in the realm of social media, as Taco Bell has learned, one photo of an employee playing with food can lead to a PR nightmare.
A Day in the Life of a QA Manager
Complying with food safety laws often falls on a company’s QA manager who supervises food safety. She walks through the facility several times a day with clipboard in hand, reviewing a list of safety and quality measures.
The QA manager will then manually key this data into a spreadsheet, create reports, and file the results with industry partners and government regulators. These seemingly routine and time-consuming compliance tasks matter. Failing to comply with the appropriate laws can lead to costly penalties, permitting delays, loss of business from industry partners (such as retailers with strict requirements), and even legal action.
The legal requirements are often complex, overlapping, and they change every couple of years. The laws are designed, of course, to ensure that food preparation and delivery is safe, thereby protecting consumers. But an expanding body of regulations and fear of litigation have increased the time, cost and stress that play into compliance.
Mobile tools can help companies improve food safety processes.
Improve Food Safety with Technology
So how can companies improve their food safety operations? By using food safety technology, particularly mobile software tools, to improve their processes. Since food safety operations are still manual, they tend to be hard to standardize and difficult to track—especially at larger companies where employees are working in multiple shifts across dozens of locations. Mobile food safety software offers several major benefits:
No More Pen and Paper. Replacing paper-and-pencil clipboards with digital tools saves time and money. Digital audits and task-lists can be logged and tracked, ensuring that staff are performing tasks in real-time. Digital entries are more accountable; managers can confirm when and where tasks where conducted and completed (including requiring photos to be taken). And digital clipboards can be loaded with reference materials like images and training videos, which helps staff learn best practices and prepare for real inspections by government agencies.
Quality and Safety Checklists. Instead of letting employees complete tasks ad hoc and make notes on clipboards and log books, companies can use quality and safety checklists to ensure that key tasks are standardized across the organization. For example, data can be collected to show that a company is always forgetting to label produce with an expiration date. Digital food safety and quality checklists that are loaded on smartphones or tablets makes it easier to ensure that all employees are following brand standards and best practices.
Automated Reports. Instead of sifting through binders filled with audit logs, food safety software captures and stores data in a structured format, making it easy to search and analyze. Why waste hours at the end of every week or month sifting through binders full of paper, when software lets you generate insights with the click of a button?
Real-Time, Centralized Management. Food companies often have multiple locations in which employees are conducting food safety operations in their own way. For companies that have multiple locations, mobile software being used by employees at each location can help corporate managers track performance by location, provide critical alerts, and give employees real-time feedback to help standardize food safety operations.
Here’s an example of a QA manager running a food safety audit using mobile software. During a random spot check, the manager shows up on the line with a smartphone in hand. As she walks around, she pulls up a food safety application and answers a series of pre-set multiple choices questions that cover key criteria, dictates comments into the device using the built-in voice recognition, and takes high-resolution color photos of several problematic issues. If a QA manager is unsure about food safety requirements, she can use her mobile device to quickly pull up a reference document (or even the official code citation) from state, FDA, USDA or other agencies.
After running a digital audit with food safety software, the QA manager can immediately print or e-mail a report that shows all of the items out of compliance, creating actionable intelligence for her team. The QA manager can then share this with line workers during their weekly team meeting, which help to train staff on best practices in food safety.
The data the QA manager collected through her mobile device is immediately stored in the cloud. From there it can be easily accessed by a colleague (i.e., her manager at corporate headquarters) at any time. Over time, the data from each of these spot checks is stored in a central database that a manager can analyze, looking for trends in performance, issues that keep arising, or locations that may need extra training and attention. Mobile software makes it easier to generate insights that can drive major improvements in an organization’s safety and performance.
By using software to help manage food safety audits, logs and line checks, businesses can save time and money on compliance, train staff on best practices, and most importantly, keep customers safe and satisfied.
Today, food safety technology, especially mobile software, should be a critical part of any modern food company’s operations. Mobile audit and task-management software allows QA managers to streamline and standardize quality and safety operations across large teams and multiple locations, helping save valuable time and money. Whether you’re a mobile food vendor or a large-scale food processor, modern software tools can help food businesses of all sizes effectively manage time-consuming tasks around food safety and compliance, from digitizing audit logs for analysis to created automated filings for supply chain partners.
SafetyChain’s FSQA Tech Talk conversation continues next week with a discussion on why cloud and mobile technologies are becoming a game changer for food safety and quality assurance (FSQA).
As part of an ongoing series that focuses on how technology is being leveraged to solve FSQA execution challenges, the next FSQA Tech Talk session’s special guest speaker will be Michele Eddy, Corporate QA Manager with UniSea. Eddy will be sharing her experience and insight as to how realtime FSQA data, which is available, anywhere, and at anytime, is helping to provide sales with immediate quality gradings, better manage HACCP, CAPA, and direct observations for UniSea’s pillars of sanitation, and how the cloud is making it easier for participants in their supply chain to work together. Eddy will also discuss use and employee adoption of mobile devices.
The session will start with SafetyChain’s Director of Technical Solutions who will discuss key benefits of the cloud on FSQA, including the ability to have realtime data proactively pushed out and acted upon, as well as how cloud and mobile devices support FSQA transparency and visibility across the value chain. Also discussed will be common cloud misperceptions including security and employee adoption.
The speakers will be taking questions live from the audience, and FSQA attendees are encouraged to bring their IT folks to participate. Attendees who would like to see what the cloud and mobile FSQA apps look like in action, are invited to stay online after the Tech Talk for a 15 minute demo of SafetyChain’s cloud and mobile solutions. The session is being held on Tuesday, May 19 at 10:00 am PDT, and those interested in attending can visit here for more information and to register.
The FSQA Tech Talks are a part of SafetyChain’s 2015 FSQA Technology Series: “Enabling Technologies – The Food Safety & Quality Assurance Game Changer” – which includes Leadership Forums, FSQA Tech Talks and Executive Briefs. Jill Bender, SafetyChain Vice President of Marketing Communications, said, “SafetyChain has been very proactive these past several years in educating industry on key FSQA challenges such as FSMA, GFSI, cost of quality and more. Input from the thousands of people who have attended our webinar forums was that they’d also like to learn more about how their peer companies are leveraging technology to execute on these challenges – and so the 2015 FSQA Technology Series was born!” “So far more than 1,500 hundred FSQA and food company IT folks have participated in the series, and we’re very excited to continue with fabulous speakers such as Michele Eddy,” Bender continued.
To learn more about SafetyChain’s FSQA Technology series visit www.safetychain.com/2015techseries.
Upcoming FSQA Tech Talks Include: June 23: Harnessing Cost of Quality July 21: Conquering HACCP, HARPC and Food Safety Plan Management Participants of this series need only sign-up once and will automatically receive notice of the next topic and login/call information. Register here for this complimentary series.
As consumers demand to know the “who, what, when, where and how” of products they purchase, companies must focus on bringing honesty to the table to build trust.
Consumers are becoming more informed about the dangers of certain ingredients and the presence of allergens and pesticides in food. In the future, virtually the only way companies can build and retain consumer trust is through providing transparency in the food chain.
“Transparency will no longer be an option,” says John Keogh, president and principal advisor at Shantalla Inc. “Food businesses have to commit themselves to transparency as the only way to demonstrate to the market how customer-oriented they are.” Keogh discussed the need for companies to be forthright not just about what is in food, but also the entire product journey—the who, what, when, where and how—during a recent webinar by the GMA Science and Education Foundation, “Transparency in the Food Value Chain”.
Drawing on examples such as the horsemeat scandal in Europe, trust is quickly lost when dishonesty rears its head. “We need to bring a level of honesty and ethics into supply chain transparency,” says Keogh. This includes disclosing where the product is made or grown, including the state, in the case of the United States; the province, in the case of Canada; and where Japan is concerned, the prefecture. A recent example is Taiwan’s plans to require prefecture labels of Japanese food imports following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, which has raised significant concerns over radioactive contamination in food.
As the supply chain becomes increasingly global and more complex, several factors are compelling transparency. Regulations that address food safety, security, defense, and fraud will all have an impact. The Foreign Supplier Verification Program (FSVP) under FSMA will put pressure on the nearly 200 countries that import products into the United States. According to Keogh, there are 220,000 importers on record, and they have about 300,000 facilities, all of which must be inspected under the FSVP mandate. In Europe, the EU regulation 1169/2011 requires the disclosure of more information to consumers, including mandatory origin labeling of unprocessed meat from pigs, sheep, goats and poultry, mandatory nutrition labels on process foods, and disclosure of allergens in the ingredient list. Companies will also need to consider requirements for Halal and Kosher foods.
Technology plays the key role in driving consumer awareness and demand for more information, but Keogh notes there is a gap between consumer expectations from a data perspective and the ability of companies to actually deliver this data. He offers some examples of emerging technologies that companies can use to facilitate supply chain transparency. Sourcemap is a supply chain mapping solution that allows companies to link from their raw materials sites to the end customers. Companies can generate reports from various metrics and identify the weak links in their supply chain. Trace One is a product lifecycle management solution that has a focused module for transparency. The company also recently announced the first B2B social network for supply chain transparency as well as the full alignment with GS1 standards and embedding fTrace into its platform. Manufacturers using Trace One have visibility on all of their ingredients, suppliers and facilities, and can search for products that may be affected by an ingredient or facility problems related to a recall, for example.
“Food chain transparency has the potential to create new business opportunities for retailers and manufacturers,” says Keogh. Moving forward, companies will need to have a foundation of standards, specifically GS1 Standards, and use them at a deeper level to enable interoperability between the technologies that supply chain partners use. Keogh urges companies to think beyond food safety and food quality to value-based transparency to increase value not just for the end consumer but also for supply chain partners. This will also involve ensuring privacy of data surrounding pricing and proprietary information.
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