Last week, Michael Taylor was appointed the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) deputy commissioner for foods. On Wednesday, the veteran food expert told members of the Northwest Food Processors Association, which held its annual conference in Oregon, that change won't happen quickly.

Ensuring food safety can be a daunting task. Nonetheless, food safety, compliance, product recalls and brand reputation have forced manufacturers to re-examine the ability to provide enterprise-wide traceability, according to a recent Aberdeen Group report.

Late last year, the Aberdeen Group examined the experiences and intentions of more than 185 organizations focused on product quality and traceability. The study showed the ways that "best-in-class" food manufacturers work to reduce the impact of food safety incidents. The research looked at how these manufacturers collaborate with suppliers, gain intelligence on quality metrics and produce compliant products to lower the number of recalls and improve the customer experience.

"Food safety is one of the most pressing issues in the industry today, and at the heart of it we find traceability and closed-loop quality management as key technology enablers," coauthor Matthew Littlefield, a senior research analyst at the Aberdeen Group, said in an announcement of the report. "Food safety is truly an end-to-end business process, starting at raw materials, moving through manufacturing operations, to distribution, and finally ending at the point of consumption."

The Aberdeen Group says that the focus now is on developing product and process traceability throughout a product's life cycle, and that "best-in-class" organizations are maintaining food safety across all process stages.

Aberdeen's analysis found that "best-in-class" companies (the top 20 percent of respondents) are gaining significant competitive advantages, not just over "laggards (the bottom 30 percent) but also "industry average" firms (the remaining 50 percent surveyed). These findings are based on four criteria: products in compliance; complete and on-time shipments; overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), or metric accounting for availability, performance and quality; and response time to non-conforming shipments.

The Aberdeen report indicated which strategic actions and business process capabilities are enabling best-in-class organizations to outperform the rest.

Foremost, organizations should have compliance and traceability already built into production processes, enabling companies to have critical information for improved decision making, such as how a product was manufactured and what equipment was used. Moreover, food safety and traceability issues need to be on the executive agenda.

Once compliance and traceability are integrated into production processes and executive focus has been established, industry-average companies are advised to take the following actions to improve performance in food safety:

• Leverage cross-functional continuous-improvement teams. Best-in-class organizations are more likely than others to have a cross-functional continuous-improvement team focused on product quality and traceability. Aberdeen advises that companies maintain the food and beverage industry's leadership position in leveraging these teams. In the absence of a cross-functional team with enterprise-wide responsibility, managing enterprise-wide traceability initiatives in today's global manufacturing environment would be especially challenging, if not impossible.
• Have visibility and defined responsibility for adverse product events. Best-in-class manufacturers are nearly twice as likely as laggards to have established role-based visibility and defined responsibilities for adverse product events. If established, this capability can give employees a sense of security and confidence when operating during uncertain times, such as a high-profile product recall or another quality or noncompliance problem. This strategy is more effective when implemented before, rather than after, an adverse event.
• Invest in technology across the overall technology stack. Aberdeen advises that organizations identify gaps in their technology stack and begin to fill those gaps with the solutions that will most effectively improve overall food safety and traceability. It is recommended that organizations start with enterprise resource planning (ERP), if it isn't already implemented, as 73 percent of best-in-class companies currently use it. As the organization matures, technology should be introduced whenever it makes sense for the organization. If product development and formulations is a firm's core competency, product lifecycle management (PLM) would be a good investment. If it's manufacturer operations that need improving, manufacturing operations management (MOM) software might be more suitable. If an organization lacks effective quality control, it should focus on a quality management system (QMS).

Contrary to news headlines, food and beverage manufacturers are actually on par or outperforming the industry average in every metric.

"Today we're seeing a growing focus among food and beverage manufacturers to proactively combat risk by implementing automated solutions to ensure food safety, curtail the potential for recalls, and boost overall consumer satisfaction," according to Nikki Willett, VP of Marketing and Regulatory Affairs at Pilgrim Software, which sponsored the Aberdeen report. "Companies that are proactive in dealing with these issues now throughout the product value chain (farm to fork), and focus on implementing new safety solutions, will reap the rewards of greater efficiency and lower cost."

It was one year ago that a salmonella outbreak was linked to peanut products, leading to nine deaths and more than 700 illnesses. The company that produced the products has since declared bankruptcy, lawsuits are pending and food-safety reform awaits a Senate vote.

For now, manufacturers must continue to build compliance and traceability into their production processes, with a focus on creating product and process traceability through every stage of a product's life cycle.

Earlier: Peanut Recall Sparks Large-Scale Food Safety Concerns

Resources

Food Safety and Traceability: Keeping Consumers Healthy and Happy
by Matthew Littlefield and Mehul Shah
Aberdeen Group, November 2009

Latest Trends in Food Safety and Traceability
Pilgrim Software and Aberdeen Group, Dec. 16, 2009

Michael Taylor: Food Regulators Shift Focus to Preventing Outbreaks
by Lynne Terry
The Oregonian, Jan. 20, 2010

H.R. 2749: Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009
GovTrack.us, Jan. 6, 2010 (last updated)