Bringing End-to-end Traceability to Food and Beverage Industry Supply Chains

Introduction

The importance of traceability within the food and beverage industry has gained much popularity over the decade. The food and beverage industry supply chain is crucial to both the corporates and the consumers who consume processed food. A trend is emerging where the consumer demands access to much data surrounding the sources of the raw material that make up their food, and whether those materials are sustainably produced.

According to a report by Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty, the insurance claims for product recalls reached an average of $9.5 million, with the F&B industry being the second most impacted.

With such major stakes involved with the visibility aspect of the F&B supply chain, enterprises are equipped with the task of having a much better handle on the traceability of these products. Not only the manufacturing units but also the upstream and downstream supply chain processes need to be transparent.

The pivotal role of technology

Adopting new technologies outweigh the time and effort required to make the supply chain systems fully-functional. To ensure a smooth process, F&B companies should work with the right solution providers and integrate new technologies into the supply chain.

Here are a few of newly digitized supply chain processes that benefit the F&B industry and consumers:

1. PIM: This system serves as a reference that offers centralize end-product data and makes it available to all the stakeholders internally and externally. The data which is handled by PIM is constantly updated and complies with global standards for the F&B industry. This technology offers a framework to make sure the hand-off from one supplier is traceable and trackable.
    
2. Serialization: This technology can help F&B companies to predict and control the consumer demand and can simulate the supply chain model more accurately. It also speeds-up the organization’s response time to a faulty product which reduces the damage and product waste.
    
3. Label Assurance: These solutions inspect and validate the packaging labels against their intended SKU. Label Assurance helps us to reduce the risk of product recalls occurring due to mislabelling and undeclared elements.

These technological solutions play a significant role in helping F&B organizations to cope with the challenge of food security.

Achieving end-to-end supply chain traceability

– Digitize Your Supply Chain

Digitization is the heart and soul of modern enterprises. The modern supply chains are running swiftly towards the digital world. To achieve end-to-end traceability, every element in the F&B supply chains need to be digitized. Despite the size of your organization, if your data isn’t digitized, your supply chain would never reach the peak performance. Blockchain in the food supply chain possesses the benefits of reduced food fraud and improved consumer information.

If your supply chain is digitized, you can stay worry-free about your data, its time, and its accuracy.

– Standardize Your Data

As the F&B supply chain continues to expand and become complex, the operations involved in managing the logistics become more complicated. Enterprises have a huge amount of data that is non-standardized and must be standardized to yield transparency at every level of the supply chain.

Tracking events and traceability are only good when the data is standardized. If this isn’t the case, companies cannot achieve the quality of information they require.

– Data Security

Planning strategically and accordingly is important for a successful digital supply chain with end-to-end traceability. Ensuring that your data is safe and adequately protected is important to ensure genuine products. By Integrating Blockchain in food supply chain management, you can effectively manage your supply chain.

With a recent increase in the contamination issues in the supply chain, the need for standardized protected data has also increased. To achieve such levels of data security, you must work with a suitable solution provider.

– Incentive Structures

Incentives used for digitizing data is one of the weaker sections of the supply chain. Organizations that consider adopting traceability as a cost, would do the bare minimum to incorporate the right technologies. This mistake would affect the consumers, and we must realize that the consumers are the driving force behind these needs.

If organizations want to achieve full visibility and maximize their access to the information, they must embrace the available technologies and modernize their data capabilities.

Importance of traceability in the F&B industry

There are several reasons why traceability is an essential goal of the Food and Beverage industry. Due to its essential role in maintaining food safety, traceability requires a sound, integrated systems to ensure effective controls. There are two distinct components of traceability- tracking and tracing. Tracing creates a history of a product’s navigation and provides complete information about the product’s origin and movements forward.

To work effectively, your traceability system needs to be verified, result-oriented, and cost-effective and applied consistently. Traceability relies on transparency. Without supply chain transparency, it is not practically feasible to implement traceability.

At Debut Infotech, we work diligently towards the SaaS-based Blockchain supply chain solutions to provide the right technical expertise and guidance to ensure traceability, food safety, compliance with the guidelines, and trust throughout the food chain.

Learn more about our processes now.