Traceability remains the stamp of credibility in the Food Industry

In a recent edition of the Grocer, we saw Marks & Spencer (M&S) latest summer-long advert showcasing the credibility of their beef traceability. Five years later, the 2013 horse meat scandal is still at the forefront of the customers’ minds.

The M&S advertisement campaign states: “We can trace ALL our beef right back to every farm and animal. We’re the only national retailer who can say that. WE TRACE IT, SO YOU CAN TRUST IT.”

The Europe-wide horse meat scandal was caused due to foods being advertised as containing beef that was then found to contain undeclared or improperly declared horse meat.

As a result, there were widespread concerns that the veterinary drug phenylbutazone could enter the human supply chain, despite regulations that imply that any horse treated with the drug cannot legally be consumed by a human. Additionally, experts and government officials stated that Romanian horse meat could contain equine infectious anaemia which is the equivalent of HIV within horses.

M&S head of agriculture, Steve McLean told the Grocer: “This gives us better traceability than anyone else in the market. When it comes to beef, it means we know where every single animal was reared, how it was reared and how the beef moved through our supply chain.”

Any food production company must be able to demonstrate they can track their product at every level of the supply chain if they aim to maintain any level of credibility. Failure to do so, could lead to a heavily damaged reputation and ultimately a loss of sales, particularly in the wake of such a high-profile scandal.

Dynamics Food is the business-wide software solution you need for reliable traceability

The fall-out from the horse meat scandal resulted in numerous arrests, a European Union inquest, anger from religious groups, risk of disease and the sales of hamburgers and frozen ready meals plunged. All of this was a result of a major breakdown in the traceability of the food supply chain.

In turn, the spotlight is still well and truly on the Food industry to deliver and trace exactly what they promise. Every ingredient you place into a product needs to be traceable to the supplier to ensure that you can track the culprit in a disastrous situation such as the horse meat scandal. Inevitably, such an emphasis on traceability will create an overhead in admin but by using one central system in the form of Dynamics Food you can maintain accurate traceability records.

The risk of error associated with manual data entry and paper-based processes is far too high to have reliable traceability. The automated data collection tools within Dynamics Food will walk your employees through each step of the process for goods in, in-house materials transfers, production, intra-plant transfers, putting away finished products, picking products for shipment and creating shipments.

Issues within your supply-chain can be stressful enough, so don’t leave yourself in a position where you can’t answer questions on why things went wrong, as it will only create unnecessary downtime and stress. Long gone are the days, where any food manufacturer should be manually entering data into disparate Excel spreadsheets or even worse paper. Dynamics Food will collect all the information that legislation demands about raw ingredients and finished products in a single database.

Transform your processes & operations with Dynamics Food

Technology Management helps Manufacturing and Distribution businesses transform their processes and operations with Microsoft Dynamics.

If you want to learn more about how Dynamics Food can support your business, come along and register your ticket for the Food & Drink IT Summit at the Ricoh Arena, Coventry on Tuesday 2nd October. We will be exhibiting on Stand J07 and it would be fantastic to learn more about you and your system.

Dynamics Food is our offer of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central/Dynamics 365 to provide a complete end-to-end ERP software for food companies. To learn more about Dynamics Food, please visit: www.tecman.co.uk/food