Building a Strong Food Safety Culture Through Collaboration

Distribute a newsletter semiannually or quarterly. It’s important to maintain a consistent communication stream with your supplier community. Distributing a newsletter with policy change updates and other essential information holds a company accountable by ensuring it is keeping partners updated. By committing to a regular newsletter, you can ensure that changes are communicated regularly.

Conduct a “fire drill.” An annual “fire drill” can be used to ensure accurate supplier contact information. Although employee turnover is common, retailers and suppliers often forget to tell their business partners. By updating contact info annually (or semi-annually), you can ensure your messages are getting through. During a “fire drill,” you should solicit an action from the supplier, such as something as simple as “respond” or “click here” to confirm the email address.

Take Advantage of Technology

In a world where consumers demand greater food health and safety, technology is imperative. In order to strengthen a food safety culture within a business, incorporating collaborative technology is essential. With more needs comes more data. To list every ingredient, identify the origin of products, and stay ahead of trends, it can be difficult to piece together industry data requirements. Advancements in technology have simplified this process.

Data helps maintain consistency across global food supply chains, assess risks, and address challenges quicker than ever before, but it must be filtered to understand and benefit from it properly. Suppliers and retailers can leverage data and technology to drive down costs, minimize risks, and care for their consumer brands.

The Future of Food Safety

Each year, Trace One conducts research in the food private label industry to gauge how supply chain partners are communicating and the efficiency of their processes. Participants are asked about the tools they use to communicate and share information, as well as how collaboration and transparency impacts respondents’ businesses and what they consider to be major collaboration challenges in today’s private label industry.

In the 2016 survey, retailers and suppliers clearly identified collaboration as a crucial ingredient for their private label success. In fact, 68 percent of respondents attributed an increase in private label sales to their ability to communicate and share information with partners throughout the supply chain.

Incredible progress can be achieved when collaborative solutions and ambitious leaders join together to propel an industry forward. With numerous viewpoints to learn from, the world of food safety—from packaging and sanitation to supply chain management and sustainability—grows stronger every day. By leveraging technology and relationships, collaboration can help retailers build trust with their suppliers, and ultimately their consumers.

Thompson is senior program manager of supplier collaboration for Trace One. Reach her at [email protected].