STELAR Tackles Food Safety: Key Insights from Agroknow
On December 5th, the EU project STELAR held a webinar on food safety benchmarking. The virtual event was organised by STELAR partner and leader of the project’s Pilot A, Agroknow. The guests tackled the very current problem faced by food and beverage companies – how can they benchmark their food safety performance with precision?
Other hot topics were discussed as well, so scroll down to find out more!
What Food Safety Dilemmas Were Covered?
At the virtual sit down, Angela Ferhati, Key Account Manager at Agroknow, greeted Carmella H. Rashed, Global Director of Regulatory Affairs at Bimbo QSR, and Iraklis Posnakidis, Senior Lead Software Engineer at Agroknow.
Some of the questions they have touched upon were:
- What are common metrics and KPIs used by food and beverage companies to assess food safety performance?
- How do these companies evaluate their performance metrics in comparison to others within their industry or market?
- Is there an automated approach for gathering, consolidating, analysing, and presenting data to assess compliance with global food safety standards?
- What horizon scanning tools are available to improve food safety procedures?
- What are some examples of Use Case Scenarios from FOODAKAI’s Benchmarking module?
Crucial Moments from the Food Safety Benchmarking Webinar
The panellists and the moderator got down to discussing pain points and providing potential solutions for food safety benchmarking. While some answers remain unchanged over the years due to persistent user needs, other insightful answers came up, seeing how the nature of technology has changed in recent years.
Crucially, it was explored how food safety performance tools and metrics are vital for companies as they affect factors such as:
- Risk management
- Regulatory compliance
- Market competitiveness
- Overall strategic methods
Here is what was agreed upon:
- There is a lack of industry synergies for some food safety topics (for instance, the accepted allergic food minimal risk levels (MRLs) from country to country differ.
- There are gaps in supplier information (for instance, ingredient specification data and certificates of analyses (COAs)).
- Not enough thought is given to import and export activities that pose a problem to food companies to keep up with food safety requirements.
- Food and beverage companies need to handle the fast-changing regulatory landscape to keep up with hazard origins.
- Large companies are most concerned with reputational damage and maintaining Consumer Trust.
- Companies would immensely benefit from monthly updates on food safety performance KPIs and frequent benchmarking.
- Since many companies are now cross-continental, real-time data availability is crucial for teams to work in sync.
The webinar’s audience was invited to voice its opinion. The audience voted that the number of recalls and food safety incidents are crucial KPIs when measuring food safety performance. The audience also voted that the number of cases related to a particular sort of hazard and products followed as the most critical KPI when marking the food safety performance of their market competitors.
FOODAKAI Can Perform Food Safety Performance Benchmarking
FOODAKAI’s AI-powered platform provides actionable information based on high-quality data from almost 200 public food safety authorities from around the globe. It also offers detailed forecasts of novel risks. That gives risk managers insight to develop a comprehensive risk mitigation strategy. Through the platform’s intuitive forecasting and supplier assessment dashboards, the user can discover possible supply chain threats, pain points, risk areas, and products. Then, the user can take steps to avoid food safety incidents by removing products that don’t meet health requirements before they reach the shelves.
Advanced Food Safety Data Discovery With STELAR’s Knowledge Lake Platform
FOODAKAI is the product of Agroknow, which takes part in the EU co-funded STELAR project.
This Horizon Europe project is developing a Knowledge Lake Management System (KLMS) fit for today’s food safety needs. The Agroknow company spearheads Pilot A in STELAR. Within this Pilot, they are working to advance risk prevention in the food supply chain. By the end of the project, the FOODAKAI platform should be brought to a new level of performance thanks to the KLMS and its tools for the smart discovery of AI-ready data.
If you have enjoyed this article and want to learn more, stay in touch through our Blog or, get in touch with us directly.
For more insightful details on the discussion, check out the webinar in the video below!
