As a food business, it is essential that you have traceability within your product(s) all the way from field to your processing site as this will help you identify potential supply chain risk.
By knowing the “journey” of your ingredients and products you will be better equipped to identify risks the ingredient is being exposed to such as country-specific fraud – and will ensure that you are better positioned to make sure those risks are being managed within your supply chain and business to reduce the supply chain risk.
For example, when I was traveling between factories in a hot country, I repeatedly noticed open milk tankers with no apparent refrigeration, bouncing along rough open roads and frequently stopping at the roadside to collect milk from open churns.
The farmers and tanker drivers had improvised a creative, but not food-safe, method to ensure the milk passed dairy intake checks. Their modus operandi highlighted a food safety risk that could be overlooked.
Many supply chains contain multiple steps which make it more difficult to gain full understanding of where ingredients come from and where they go to. However, this complexity should not be used as an excuse to hide behind as you still need to know where your ingredients are coming from and you should take any available step in reducing supply chain risk before it is too late.
If you are struggling to find the information of where your ingredients have come from, ask your suppliers (they should know, and if they don’t you should have monitor them closely as a high-risk supplier!)
To simplify the management of your suppliers QADEX have created a supply chain risk management system to ensure your company will be automatically audit ready 24/7 and that all suppliers are managed consistently. If you would like to learn more about how this can help you please click here to get in touch.