Tips for Food Safety Performance Reporting and Benchmarking
When discussing food safety performance and benchmarking, we focus mostly on how much food safety objectives and benchmarks are met. First and foremost, food safety reflects the quality and efficiency of a food safety management system. Also, it deals with the protocols and processes in place, such as sanitary conditions, proper storing, handling of products, monitoring humidity levels, etc.
Importance of Internal and External Monitoring
To properly monitor food safety performance and report on it, a company or organisation needs to measure specific KPIs such as safety audits, inspections, lab tests, warning letters, food safety incidents, and corrective actions that can assist in compliance.
But keeping our affairs in order is not enough. Food companies, apart from measuring their internal food safety performance, also measure the food safety performance of their competitors. To secure the advancement of their own company, they need to have a total overview of the market. That means they need to know and understand the position of their company when it comes to food safety.
Naturally, monitoring different internal KPIs and keeping track of competitors requires an arduous amount of time, if done manually. Quarterly food reports consist of dozens of pages, so there is an obvious need for automating and streamlining the process.
The Challenges of Measuring Food Safety Performance
Food companies create food safety performance reports for their company and all direct and indirect competitors in their different markets around the globe. In the process, they face several challenges, such as:
- The reliance on the quarterly reports of large organisations such as WHO/INFOSAN for consumer-important food safety events to create food safety and benchmarking reports, accentuated by WHO’s decision to stop publishing analytical reports, making it difficult to find such information.
- Coping with the data overload from diverse sources worldwide for food safety incidents is a daunting task. That entails employing internal and expensive third-party solutions, which pose difficulties correlating data into actionable insights for evaluating safety performance against competitors.
- A lack of a centralised environment compounds the issue, as manual research and the compilation from various reports and news websites become the norm. This manual process consumes significant time, hindering the ability to produce frequent benchmark reports.
- The scarcity of high-quality, actionable food safety performance data is the main concern. This scarcity hinders the creation of insightful and comprehensive reports on company performance and competitor analysis, thereby impeding informed business and strategic decision-making.
- The absence of clear data segregation obscures critical food safety incidents directly impact consumer health, making it challenging to distinguish incidents with health consequences from those without.
- Managing multiple brands and subsidiaries adds complexity to monitoring food safety performance, making it challenging to keep track and gain a deeper understanding of the risk profile associated with each brand.
- Tailoring reports to meet the specific needs of different brands, subsidiaries, or locations is hindered by a lack of customizable solutions. This challenge arises from different territories/brands/subsidiaries requiring distinct data on suppliers, ingredients, and food products for effective reporting.
These obstacles show there is an immediate need for a method that will let food manufacturers simplify the process and let them have a better understanding of their positioning in the industry about food safety.
Tips for Boosting Food Safety Performance Monitoring and Benchmarking
First, you need to find out the pain points of your food company. What are the biggest weaknesses in your food company’s food safety performance when compared to your food competitors? That information helps in building strategies for addressing them and setting up a plan of corrective measures in place.
An AI solution not only automates the process, but provides actionable food safety incident insights, risks, and hazards. It is a solid way to streamline the benchmarking process for your food company against competitors. Such an AI-solution allow you to:
- Provide an overview of global food safety standards, allowing your food company to assess its position in comparison to industry benchmarks and competitors.
- Facilitate the benchmarking of your food safety performance against industry standards, competitors, and specific key ingredients within designated geographical areas.
- Offer insights into emerging threats and the ability to focus on specific subsidiaries or brands within your organization.
- Grant access to hazard analyses of key ingredients, offering comprehensive descriptions of hazards, including their types (biological, chemical, physical) and occurrence rates.
- Provide a comparative perspective on competitors’ and overall market food safety performance, highlighting specific emerging risks that may impact the industry.
- Tailor the analysis by excluding non-critical risk types, such as border rejections, from your company’s supply chain considerations.
Leveraging a tailored solution that delivers actionable insights into food safety performance, driven by high-quality data specifically customised for your supply chain, company brands, and subsidiaries, food manufacturers can effectively benchmark overall food safety against the broader market or competitors within chosen ingredients.
Through the utilization of FOODAKAI‘s AI-powered platform, you gain a comprehensive comparative perspective on all crucial food safety incidents involving your company, its brands, and/or subsidiaries. This comparison extends to specific competitors offering similar products, the entire market, or selected geographical areas.
Furthermore, your food and beverage enterprise can access an aggregated overview of all hazards and risks (physical, chemical, biological, fraud) linked to these incidents for specific products, presented through user-friendly analytical charts and dashboards encompassing both direct and indirect competitors. For a deeper understanding, you have the option to drill down further, examining incident counts per food safety hazard and conducting risk analysis to pinpoint emerging risks correlated to critical cases.
The Benchmarking module offered by FOODAKAI empowers you to optimize competitor analysis and devise strategic responses to emerging risks, enhancing your ability to efficiently address threats and fortify your HACCP plan. Gain access to an enriched overview of competitors’ food safety performance, with a specific focus on critical incidents related to your key ingredients and categorized by hazard types, facilitating the creation of insightful food safety performance reports.
For a deeper understanding of how FOODAKAI can streamline your competitor analysis by benchmarking against the entire market, consider starting with a pilot. Discover the comprehensive capabilities that enable you to navigate the competitive landscape and enhance your strategic planning in response to evolving risks. And for more information how can a data management system help you mitigate food safety risks, follow the STELAR Blog.
NOTE: This article was written by Dimitris Alexopoulos from Agroknow. It was edited for clarity and by SEO guidances by the STELAR project’s WP4 leaders.
Dimitris 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.
