What have we achieved? A review since the Global Food Safety Conference 2016

You can read my immediate reflections from the GFSC 2016 here on my personal blog page. If you click the link you will also find that it is the most recent blog post by me as well. There are many reasons for that but primarily it has been the sharpening of focus on what we are working with and the dedication of the team towards those goals and what we want to achieve for our customers.

At the conference in 2016 we introduced our new food safety sampling system related to our filling machines and we have a great deal of interest in that now. During the discussions at the conference, and also with plenty of customers since, we have seen that this is an area of great need but that we need to do more to really meet the daily challenges that our customers face.

I highlighted that digitalisation is coming and that supply chain complexity is increasing. Whilst these may seem somewhat separate trends they are very closely related as the former is most definitely a game changer for the later. Supply chain complexity might seem a challenge in logistics and for sure it is but when concerned about food safety it creates more steps, more different systems and a greater need to trace through disparate entities to the end consumer. This helps food producers reach a wider consumer audience but also provides a significant headache when it comes to traceability.

In this year’s conference hosted in Houston Texas, my vice president Johan Nilsson will talk about our digital strategy in Tetra Pak and how it helps our customers with some of these challenges. For sure we do not yet have the ultimate solution to these increasing challenges (if such a thing is realistically achievable) but we are working towards increasing the sophistication of our traceability offerings with package level track and trace to the consumer, greater visualisations and real-time availability of data to the quality manager and additional systems for tracking issues all the way back into the supply chain.

Systems like these are nothing new but as Johan will talk about we are able to leverage the data coming from them to provide unique insights as to what is really going on in operations and therefore build a bedrock for the continuous improvement of food safety.

I don’t want to preempt the presentation too much but when published I will provide a more in-depth look into what it is we have been working on and how these technologies will ultimately transform the way we manage and make food safe and available everywhere.

If you would like to hear some of the broader thoughts on food safety, here is a video of me at last year’s conference.