From Farm to Fork – Moving Beyond Single Steps with the Cloud

One of the key rules for manufacturers has always been the one step back, one step forward principle: you must be able to identify the supplier and the recipient of every ingredient and product. With today’s technology, however, this seems like a weak requirement.In the late 1990’s Europe had a number of high profile food quality crises. By far the most significant was mad cow disease (BSE), which had an impact on the food industry worldwide. Others included dioxin contamination of feedstock for chickens that got into both poultry and eggs, and the Coca-Cola health crisis in Belgium and neighboring countries.

The Coca-Cola crisis in June 1999 arose when a number of schoolchildren fell ill immediately after drinking Coca-Cola. The company moved slowly, denied responsibility, and was finally ordered by the government to recall all Coca-Cola products in the country. The Netherlands and parts of France followed suit. Incorrect initial recalls due to lack of knowledge of which batches were affected led to more illness. After an investigation, Coca-Cola admitted that it had discovered contaminated carbon dioxide but denied it would have caused illness.

The public outcry over these problems led the EU to revisit its ancient food safety regulations and introduce new legislation known as the General Food Law. It included feedstock in the food chain, defined detailed risk management principles, and introduced the concept of 'Farm to Fork' for food traceability. Much of this relates to fresh food, but for manufacturers food processing and tracing is the key interest. Some extra information has to be supplied for meat products. Food traceability is defined as the ability to trace and follow food, feed, and ingredients through all stages of production, processing, and distribution. We suggest that much more can be done in terms of genealogy, traceability, and customer relations.

Getting the Customer Involved

One early example of Farm to Fork traceability was the Aeon supermarket company in Japan. They went as far as putting computer terminals into fresh meat departments to allow customers to type in a code; they could then determine the whole history of the Wagyu beef they were buying. The initial success and excitement died down but the terminals remained: just knowing that such information is available is enough to maintain customer confidence in the product.

Beyond One Step

Cloud computing is now universal, Big Data is the norm, and analytics are everywhere. Traceability of our food is still in its infancy. The laws requiring one step forward and back could be implemented on paper, but today we would hope that few do it that way. Food manufacturers that want to stay safe and avoid reputation damaging events need to think way beyond one step. They should also be considering genealogy, as well as traceability. “If I find a tainted product, I can trace backwards through production stages to discover the guilty ingredient or process, and then I can trace forward again to find all products that could be affected by that fault.” This process allows a manufacturer or distributor to minimize impact while maximizing consumer safety. Manufacturers with these sorts of abilities will gain the confidence of consumers.

Building complete raw materials to be packaged and delivered entails product genealogy and is going to take a lot of work. First you need to demonstrate that you can do your part. A few important steps include:

• Collect as much process and quality information as you can and store it in a cloud-based data system.
• Make sure you take every opportunity to differentiate between batches, raw material lots, packaging types, and finished goods. In pharmaceutical manufacturing, the goal is to have a unique serial number for every packet. That is probably going too far for a food manufacturer, but you need to think to what level of detail you want to go with raw materials as well as finished goods.
• Connect raw materials and finished goods both forwards and backwards. For example, if you have one raw material lot, demonstrate that you can find all finished batches that could in any way be affected by a problem with the raw material. It is not simple, as you might add a raw material to a feed system before the container is empty from the last lot of the same material.

Once you can demonstrate some genealogy within the enterprise, involve your main suppliers in the projects. Get them to make available genealogical information about the lots they are delivering to you, and do the same with your distributors and logistics companies. Once the lot, batch, and delivery information is available, the sky (or cloud) is the limit in the worthwhile applications that can be built.

You are not alone in this journey. There are specialist vendors who do traceability and genealogy, and there are non-profit organizations, especially GS1 who have built a global traceability standard to help in communication between enterprises in a product’s supply chain. LNS Research is always happy to hear about manufacturers' success stories in this and other fields.

Also, be sure to register below for our free webinar on Wednesday, September 9 at 2:00 pm EST. LNS Research will dive deeper into how leading companies are incorporating their Environment, Health & Safety management into overall enterprise Operational Excellence, avoiding the adverse events described above before they occur, and driving real bottom line results at the same time.