In France, nearly 1.5 million cases of food poisoning are reported each year, sometimes with serious consequences for public health. According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, about 30% of food poisoning cases occur at home and 20% occur in restaurants and shops.
Food safety is a major concern for executives and managers of any business that handles food. Risks of food poisoning, contamination and spoilage can cause damage to consumer health and brand reputation. To ensure food safety, it is essential that you have rigorous monitoring, verification and traceability procedures in place. Unfortunately, due to low investment in Quality departments, many companies have gaps in protecting their reputation. In this article, we develop the different points that allow you to analyze the potential failures in the food safety of your company.
1. Rigid HACCP approach because of paper
The fact that your food safety procedures are based on filling out data on paper is a major flaw. Paper makes it difficult for your control plans to evolve and for practices to be consistent, with sites sometimes not receiving complete and timely information. This exposes your brand to the risk of not being able to quickly and consistently implement a regulatory or brand-specific best practice change.
The digitization of the system provides a framework that you can, however, change instantly if necessary.
2. Little support for self-monitoring
The lack of tools to monitor and assist in the proper implementation of self-checks on your sites represents a risk. Self-checks are the most important monitoring measure to guarantee food safety, but their implementation is cumbersome for your teams and unreliable. On paper, they often require a lot of effort to remember, to look for the right information in files or with other colleagues, etc.
Digital technology relieves the burden on field staff. For example, by using an application to monitor temperatures, the user only enters the data, while the application indicates whether the temperature ranges are respected. Automated monitoring allows for better detection of non-conformities and more appropriate guidance to help enforce good practices. The procedures are presented in the real context of the non-conformities, which facilitates their understanding and application.
3. Paper handling time
The time you and your site managers spend managing paper organization can also be a shortcoming. Manual paper management is time-consuming and leads to processing and archiving errors, which compromises data traceability. In addition, paper storage is costly in terms of space and time.
The digital solution will allow you to automatically store all documents and data in the cloud, and access them with a few clicks. This saves a lot of time in case of incidents, as paper documents have to be found on site, while information stored online is quickly and easily accessible remotely.
4. Long and tedious reporting
A weakness is the time your quality team spends verifying, formatting and compiling data for reporting. Manually checking data is tedious and time-consuming, resulting in delays in analysis and processing. Manual compilation leads to calculation and data entry errors.
To remedy this, reporting tools are coupled with best-in-class digital self-checking solutions, allowing you to avoid errors, facilitate data analysis and generate monitoring reports.
5. Impossible to pilot
80% of food companies say they have already increased their investments in data1.
Driving by data is an essential element to prevent paper-related risks:
- Loss of data
- Registration errors
- Delayed detection of problems
- Non-exhaustive view
Companies without tools to track and analyze site or network-wide data are more likely to miss risky practices.
Operational dashboards and data mining tools are now essential means to monitor your company's practices and make informed decisions.
6. Invisible risks
Do your monitoring tools not automatically detect suddenly risky practices?
Risky food safety practices can emerge quickly and unpredictably (employee absence, intentional or unintentional error, etc.), requiring constant monitoring for early detection. Automated monitoring tools such as Eezytrace Score can be used to monitor operational practices in real time, quickly detect deviations and trigger alerts for immediate corrective action. Constant monitoring is essential to ensure food safety and protect the company's reputation.
7. Emergency interventions
The fact that emergency interventions on sites in crisis are regular shows an apparent flaw in your system. These interventions are costly and disrupt your company's production. They indicate a deficiency in monitoring and prevention procedures, and a clear danger to food safety.
You may want to consider strengthening surveillance and prevention methods to detect problems before they become crises. This may include implementing stricter controls, using advanced technology to detect at-risk sites, and training staff on good food safety practices.
8. Limited investment
Even though the global food security market is expected to reach 18 billion euros 18 billion by 20252, many companies are suffering from cuts in food safety budgets, and are jeopardizing it. Your brand is more vulnerable if Quality department resources are used to clear their name in a crisis rather than to drive the network.
To remedy this shortcoming, companies are investing in high ROI solutions and are now taking into account the cost of health crisis risk.
9. Dependence on site visits
The fact that your company relies on site visits for confidence in its daily operations can be a flaw in your food safety. The problem is not only the cost and limited frequency of these visits, but also the limited time on site, which is often insufficient to complete the entire inspection. By representing only a 0.17% attendance rate, these visits are not representative of the company's daily activity, and lead to a false confidence in the food safety procedures.
Today, the most advanced digital tools make it possible to remotely monitor the activity of sites at risk and to automatically detect stalls.
10. History not accessible
It is important that you can easily trace the history of a site's practices in the event of a serious health crisis. Traceability is essential to detect sources of contamination, isolate hazardous products and implement all corrective measures.
In the event of a food safety crisis, it is also crucial that you can quickly prove to the appropriate authorities that you have followed good food safety practices and thus reduce the impact on your brand and its reputation.
Today, almost all digital solutions allow automatic recording and access to the history of food safety practices. They guarantee compliance with regulatory requirements and facilitate controls by competent authorities.
11. Environmental impact
The use of paper and the massive movement of inspectors are not compatible with a desire to reduce its carbon footprint and show a weakness in a food safety system that must be integrated into the company's vision.
The good news is that technological innovations and data science can reduce the number of on-site visits required to monitor a network by up to 35%.
Conclusion
Analyzing the flaws in your food safety procedures is essential to avoiding crises and protecting your company's reputation. An efficient risk control system must be in place to constantly monitor risky sites, detect deviations and risky practices, and take immediate corrective action.
Adopting technological innovations will help you to:
- improve their monitoring,
- eliminate their dependence on paper,
- reduce physical inspections in the long run,
- detect potential problems before they become crises.
By implementing the right tool, companies can ensure the food safety of their products and avoid negative impacts on their reputation and bottom line.
1 Boston Consulting Group study
2 MarketsandMarkets study published in 2020
Published on:
February 16, 2023
To go further in risk management, download our step-by-step guide of 36 pages. (Available in English soon)
