Unexpected Supply Chain Threats: 6 Ways How to Act Against Them
Often, news breaks out of massive contamination of a number of food products due to untreated supply chain threats. That forces large food retailers to recall their products from multiple markets around the globe simultaneously. They rush to pinpoint the exact source of the contamination and its scale throughout a complex supply chain. It might take days to remove products that don’t meet the safety requirements for consumption.
Food retailers strive to ensure public health through the offering of high-quality products. But they don’t always have a complete overview of what’s happening across their supply chain and all risks that might affect it. As a result, they can be left exposed to supply chain threats. These, besides consumers health, can gravely impact food companies’ business continuity, reputation and sales as they address the food safety incident.
Faced with the reputational and economic ramifications of a food safety incident, food retailers can adopt a more proactive approach, rather than a reactive one, to unexpected threats and food fraud cases.
The Challenges of Knowing All the Risks to Your Supply Chain
Being proactive about potential food safety incidents requires a clear overview of all risks that can impact your supply chain. However, finding out where and how your supply chain can be compromised throughout its whole length can be a lengthy task for food retailers. Especially when the risks keep mounting – according to WTW and its 2023 Food, Beverage and Agriculture Supply Chain Risk Report, 73% losses linked to supply chain threats had been much higher than expected over the last couple of years.
When it comes to knowing all the risks and having reliable view of how they can affect their ingredients and finished products, food retailers often tackle issues such as:
- The necessity of ensuring the authenticity (geographical and botanical) of all the ingredients and products, especially since consumers are becoming increasingly more aware of the issue, ardently requesting authentic high-quality products.
- The need for large scale continuous inspections and lab tests This ensures that all supplied products are provided to consumers with a full product ingredients list without any potential harmful omissions or mislabeling. Thus, you are avoiding food fraud (products that contained allergens that were not included in the label) this way.
- The difficulty of analyzing, harmonizing and correlating food safety data from various disparate sources (third-party solutions, suppliers from around the world, regulatory bodies) into actionable insights about potential risks to their products, especially since regulations are becoming increasingly more strict.
- The reliance on paper documentation and limited adoption of digital documentation of food safety and quality check procedures, despite urgent need for digitalization in order to promote transparency.
- The lack of a comprehensive and customizable system that collects and correlates information centrally but can also cater to the different data/informational needs of various food retailer departments or locations (teams in different territories require different suppliers and ingredient data) by allowing for data segregation and customization according to specific needs.
- The positioning of food retailers as the last line of defense to safeguard public health. This highlights their increased responsibility to review and discover products that don’t meet the health requirements for consumption before products are promoted to consumers.
- The added risk of ensuring the product safety of supplied fresh, raw materials. There is an increase in their consumption due the globally wide promotion of healthier lifestyles.
From Reactiveness to Preventiveness
With public health in mind, food retailers need to prioritize on strengthening their procedures and protocols. Moreover, they need to enhance internal audits by acquiring a more reliable view of all threats to their ingredients and finished products. That way, they can avoid food safety incidents and frauds.
Heralded as one of the solutions that can have multiple applications in avoiding supply chain threats, AI technology and predictive analytics can be utilized by food retail companies. These can help identify and respond to risks quicker. Tapping into AI, a food company could benefit from:
- Improved traceability and transparency throughout the supply chain via the concentration of all food safety incidents and data in a single unified platform. The platform can notify you of food safety events anywhere in the world so you can recall your products, adhering to the increasingly strict traceability rules and need for digitization.
- Continuously updated food safety insights based on high-quality data from public food safety authorities.
- Advanced hazard analysis on all your raw materials and final products that allow you to have an overview of all food authentication aspects of the foodstuff.
- Reliable and highly accurate forecasts for future food safety events for specific raw materials and ingredients for specific geographical areas.
- Enhanced supplier risk assessment and evaluation factoring in the risk estimation for each ingredient or raw material sourced, as well as the geographical origin of the supplier.
- Enhanced sustainability efforts and meeting goals by reducing food waste and providing safe products.
Utilising an AI-powered solution that provides actionable insights from high-quality data can greatly empower your decision-making process when dealing with supply chain threats. Through elevated suppliers’ assessment based on risk performance from past incidents, ingredients sourced, and geographies, one can evaluate existing suppliers and select new ones according to their performance.
Through forecasts trends on incidents and hazards for specific raw materials and products, food retailers can discover the products or geographical areas with higher risk, as well the associated supplier they source from in these areas. Then, they can take preventive measures. With total overview of emerging supply chain threats, risk managers can formulate a comprehensive lab plan strategy, increasing inspections of their suppliers and/or internal audits.
FOODAKAI Platform Can Forecast Food Risks
FOODAKAI’s AI-powered platform offers actionable insights based on high-quality data from more than 190 public food safety authorities worldwide and highly accurate forecasts on emerging risks that empower risk managers to create a comprehensive risk mitigation strategy. Through the platform’s intuitive forecast and supplier assessment dashboards, you can discover potential supply chain threats, risk areas and products and take measures to avoid food safety incidents by removing products that don’t meet health requirements before they reach the shelves.
Advanced Data Discovery Through a Knowledge Lake Platform
FOODAKAI is the product of Agroknow, which takes part in the STELAR project.
STELAR, a Horizon Europe project, is working towards developing a Knowledge Lake Management System (KLMS) fit for today’s food safety needs. Agroknow is the leader of Pilot A in STELAR in which 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 smart discovery of AI-ready data.
NOTE: This article was written by Dimitrios Alexopoulos from Agroknow. It was edited for clarity and by SEO guidances by the STELAR project’s WP6 leaders.
Dimitrios Alexopoulos
Dimitris Alexopoulos Tsoras is Content Editorial Manager at Agroknow with more than five years of experience in Content Marketing and in the tech industry. He has an MA in Creative Writing and specialises in content & product marketing for B2B companies.
