Enterprise Business Systems Play Role in Organic Product Manufacturing

While these efforts to grow market share and improve efficiency and productivity are helping brand owners to maintain or even grow profit margins, they are discovering that outsourced manufacturing places added pressure on their own business processes, record keeping, accountability, and ultimately, their ability to provide an audit trail based on best practices. This market trend is certain to impact the ability of organic food brand owners to certify the integrity and quality of food ingredients, material handling, and value-added production processes, both within and beyond their own company boundaries.

As a result, in order to meet existing USDA certification requirements for organic products, the entire global food chain, including food processors, continues to invest in both enterprise and production operations business systems. The goal is to better manage their ingredient sourcing, material handling, quality testing, and controlled production processing in order to capture and retain clear and detailed audit trails about the receipt and value-add processing of ingredients, intermediate, and shelf-ready organic food products. These systems also manage the information links of both on-site and off-site third party manufacturing and warehousing as organic ingredients and products move through the extended supply chain.

Providing automated traceability of product and process history for each individual product and lot means being able to track saleable products to the end consumer, back through the warehouse, through all value-add manufacturing processing steps. It also requires retaining and managing all incoming ingredient quality and quantity information from each organic grower and harvester as products make their way through the steps in the organic supply chain.

It is expected that USDA organic guidelines will continue to evolve, refining and redefining the necessary guidelines and best practices associated with providing organic versus “industrial” foods. Current organic certification standards have been targeted by growers, suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers who contend that they’re too strict and that growing consumer demand for organic foods is already greater than their ability to deliver certified organic foods to meet that demand.

For growers, this challenge is primarily a result of the elapsed pesticide-free time required to certify their first organic crops. Similarly, organic food manufacturers are concerned about the stringent business processes they must adhere to in order to gain and retain labeling certification for both organic ingredients and processed organic products. This introduces quality considerations into the production processing environment.

Isolated and Managed Processing

When organic and nonorganic foods are produced in the same food plant, processing must be isolated and managed according to USDA certification guidelines. For example, the USDA requires that organic products be isolated in order to avoid cross-contamination with nonorganic food products that don’t contain the required percentage of organic ingredients or adhere to the organic food processing standards required for foods to be certified or labeled organic.

Just as it is critical to control and manage the growing activities and quality of crops in certified organic fields, food processors must be able to automate the control of production schedule sequencing and actual detailed processing activities required when both organic and nonorganic products are being manufactured in the same plant, often during the same shift, and possibly on the same production line or lines. In some plants, this may be accomplished by following—and reporting adherence to—strict cleanup procedures and quality testing confirmation after the completion of nonorganic processing and prior to beginning organic processing.

Some food manufacturers may actually assign specially dedicated organic-only production lines—with the added costs of equipment and operators—in order to ensure isolated processing and protect the existing certification of organic products. Clearly, it is critical that organic food processors be able to demonstrate compliance and operational best practices that support the necessary level of control for USDA organic certification.