The recent paradigm shift in technology towards automated data collection, process control, and quality management has revolutionized traceability in the food supply chain.
Many manufacturers use cutting-edge food traceability processes to track raw materials, ingredients, manufacturing processes, and final distribution.
The next level of control and food traceability implies data automation and digital transformation of the existing manufacturing and supply chain processes.
What is Food Traceability?
Food traceability consists of multiple steps to trace all the product components, starting from raw supply and other ingredients to the final product.
Scannable barcodes are a perfect example of traceability. The consumers can scan the barcodes to access the product information, such as batch number, weight, expiry, and other ingredients.
Furthermore, traceability and control in an industrial slaughter process mean tracking the live animals that come to the factory, their weight, initial inspection, purchase order, kill number, and carcass classification. The entire process collects information to generate visual graphs, reports, and dashboards to present valuable insight into the whole production.
The primary advantage of food traceability is to minimize human error and manual audits. It’s because the system collects real-time information during the process. Moreover, it offers satisfaction to the consumers and improves customer experience as they can also trace back the product to its source.
Another reason for ensuring quality control is to reduce the total number of food recalls. Traceability plays a significant role in food safety management, allowing the manufacturers to recall contaminated or faulty products.
To sum up, traceability ensures transparency between the manufacturers and consumers.
What’s the Next Level of Food Traceability?
Read along to learn different methods that ensure traceability and control.
Data Collection and Automation
In this digital world, real-time data is the king. The food processing industries deploy information systems to collect data about the raw products in real-time. Furthermore, the data is processed and structured to create different visual dashboards and other performance reports.
This way, the management and planning team can make data-driven decisions to enhance the food supply chain’s quality, performance, and traceability.
Food industries use different scanners, touch screens, and other sensors throughout the conveyor belt to collect relevant information.
Process Control
Advanced information system ensures traceability by registering every incoming product in the database. Not only that, but the system automatically generates the purchase order against all the food ingredients. All the information about the food items available in the inventory is stored in online databases.
Moreover, a grading system evaluates the product quality and registers the comments regarding the quality.
Performance Evaluation and Management
The primary idea of collecting and storing the data is to generate reports regarding the operational efficiency and quality of the existing manufacturing process.
These valuable and informative reports assist different teams across the food industry in improving the performance and quality of the process.
Traceability allows the teams to keep a close eye on the inventory regarding the available products—this way, the management can make a timely decision regarding buying the raw material at the right time.
Quality Control
Traceability implements compliance in the food supply chain. Moreover, the information system is responsible for the quality assurance and control of the final product before distribution.
As the data is collected in real-time, the information system notifies in case the quality falls below a certain threshold, allowing the management to take timely decisions to take necessary action to resolve the issue.
Consequently, all the data collected by the system, including the quality checks, raw material, purchase order, and required actions, enhance traceability.
Traceability serves a multi-purpose role to help the food industries in improving their processing and minimize human error. Moreover, it allows the customers to trace the ingredients back to their sources.
Integration
Traceability ensures data integration from separate processes on one platform or performance management portal. Therefore, different teams can work collaboratively and share data regarding inter-linked processes to improve efficiency. Moreover, the food industry can synchronize the third-party systems, vendors, and ERPs to gather information on shared servers.
Food traceability is an integral component of the food sector, including dairies and slaughter systems. Moreover, it ensures transparency, food safety and compliance.
Different manufacturers collect real-time information of the raw products to analyze performance management dashboards and gain insights into the production.
Digital transformation and proper planning is the advanced level of quality control to maximize traceability and, of course, yield.
