What Does Food Safety Really Mean?
So far, 2020 has been an absolute rollercoaster of a year, with cyclones, Locust Swarms, and the greatest public health crisis of our generation. COVID-19 has forced everyone across the globe to question everything we think we know about the concepts of health, safety, and hygiene. Especially with regards to what we eat. Being an essential service, WayCool had to navigate the COVID crisis and find ways to keep all our stakeholders safe while performing our duty.
Personally, I am incredibly proud of what the team has accomplished. Within a week the entire company looked completely different with far reaching and detailed safety measures including PPE, zero contact hand sanitizers, UV-C treatments for crates, vehicle disinfection being done from the source in rural India to the customers in our cities, and even aerosol sprays to sanitize AC ducts.
In addition, the team has tied up with multiple government and NGO initiatives to offer relief efforts to those in cities, launched a fundraising campaign (which is still active by the way) to donate PPE to farmers in villages, and still managed to ensure safe business continuity for our clients as per government guidelines.
But today, I don’t want to talk about our COVID-19 prevention efforts. While we endure a global pandemic that has wreaked havoc across food supply chains world over, it’s important to take a step back and try to understand the concept of Food Safety in general. What worked well? What broke? And more importantly, what we need to keep in mind moving forward? Today is the perfect day to explore this in detail, given that it is in fact, World Food Safety Day.
Food Safety isn’t the flavor of the month here at WayCool, it’s been an integral part of how we’ve built our company from day one. We spent a long time benchmarking the best companies in the world with regards to quality control, and realized that across any product in any country, Food Safety really comes down to 3 main components: Cultivation, Logistics, and Quality Checks. Whatever quality issues the world has seen, be it E.Coli outbreaks in USA, or the use of carbide ripening in India, a combination of these 3 components can offer an enormous amount of control to ensure preventive and corrective actions.
Cultivation
Unsurprisingly, food safety starts at the beginning of the food supply chain, not just at the first transaction. We’ve already written extensively about the importance of proper pre-cultivation planning, detailed out here, and it’s evident that without an adequate understanding of what is happening before harvest it’s difficult to claim actual Food Safety.
It is our firm belief that buying from farmers is easy. However, working with farmers from a soil testing and pre-cultivation level, to ensure higher quality products are grown, is much more difficult. That is what this ecosystem needs to prioritize. In the quest for simple operating models, we cannot build simplistic ones. Food safety is extremely complex and the ecosystem needs to accept, digest, and invest into this complexity.
Through our Outgrow program and our MyFarm suite of applications that cover package of practices, inputs tracking, soil testing, and more, we work hand in hand with our farmers to grow better quality products. We partner with them to achieve this goal together rather than simply holding them accountable for giving us safe food.
Logistics
Assuming that everyone in the industry has engaged appropriately with farmers and have successfully cultivated high quality products using safe water, trusted seeds, and approved fertilizers customized to match the unique soil and weather profile of each individual farm… What next? In India, this is where most food safety issues can occur or be avoided.
Your food can pass through 4–14 different steps and hands before it completes its journey from the farm to your fork. Each of those steps need to be carefully monitored and observed so that Food Safety is maintained. But how do you do this across hundreds of tonnes of products, thousands of farmers, and thousands of customers every day? Especially when dealing with multiple product categories across Fruits, Vegetables, Rice, Dal, Dairy, and more? This is where we’ve learned to leverage technology to its fullest.
For any product that flows through the WayCool supply chain, our homegrown RAPID software captures data at every step of the way. We can know which farmer a product came from, what inputs that farmer used, what temperate the inside of the truck was during transit, when it reached our collection center, the name of the employee who received it, and so on. And we’ve been doing this for years already. This Motor India article did a great job of capturing this Seed to Sale traceability.
What many see as novelty, we see as necessity, and have built our company from the ground up to adequately address these requirements.
Most importantly, we also realized that to minimize the number of hands touching your food, we needed to invest heavily into automation. Today around 80% of the horizontal movement in our warehouse is automated. In addition, quality checks will soon be done by machines on the basis of colour through photo and light spectrum analysis. Bulk supplies are allocated specifically to individual customer requirements by weighing machine integrated conveyor belts to avoid human intervention. This is just a glimpse of the process engineering that we have done in our food supply chain to ensure your food is as safe as possible, and you can be rest assured that there is a lot more to come.
When it comes to traceability, though WHERE your food came from is important and interesting, HOW your food traveled through the supply chain is far more critical with regards to ensuring food safety.
Quality Checks
Though quality checks seem to be the most basic, and straightforward method of ensuring food safety, the reality is that there is little consensus on what constitutes “sufficient” quality check measures. Erring on the side of caution, we check over a wide range of parameters daily that include not just physical characteristics, but also chemical (such as the presence of pesticide residue, nitrate level, etc.), taste, and nutrition, across the entire value chain.
However by studying global supply chains across industries that seemed to have the best quality control records, we discovered that there was in fact a common thread among them. They all addressed quality control from an angle of Incoming QC, In-Process QC, and Outgoing QC.
This philosophy begins at the Cultivation stage itself, where our soil-testing forms the “Incoming QC” inspection, and package of practices guidance and analysis form the “In-Process QC.” For fruits we often capture the Brix value at every stage to gain a scientific understanding of it’s sweetness, rather than a qualitative one, which forms the final stage of Quality Checks at Cultivation, “Outgoing QC.”
The same is true for our Milk supplies, where we follow the same framework by tracking time and temperate on receipt at the plant, dispatch from the plan, in transit, receipt at our warehouse, and dispatch to the customer. Additionally we have multiple modules of processing tests to ensure quality of all dairy products including Curd and Paneer, checking things like fat percentage, SNF percentage, acidity, and presence of adulterants like Salt, Sugar, and Urea. All this data is collected and analyzed using a seamless, enterprise-ready quality application that was built entirely in-house. It is this application of technology to the food supply chain that we believe is critical for ensuring the advancement of standard operating practices, rather than simple market linkages and last mile delivery.
Real World Impact
This is extremely complex, but necessary. When dealing with Food Safety, we have a moral obligation to respect the incredibly small margin of error that exists. Layering all of this data onto WayCool’s traceability platform gives us visibility into exactly how safe your food is. And if something is a concern, then we can easily trace the problem back to its source, educate the concerned stakeholders on corrections, and use this information to train others to help them avoid the same mistakes. This data is also visible to our customers through our Customer Portal in real time and historically, offering them the confidence that the food they’re consuming is truly safe.
For example, nearly two years ago, an incoming quality check at our distribution centre discovered an abnormally high level of nitrate for a batch of cabbages we received from a farmer. It would have been incredibly easy for us to simply reject his stock, send the truck back, and buy from someone else. But by piecing together every component of the Food Safety protocols detailed above, we were able to speak with the farmer and guide him on what specific practices they could change in order to produce higher quality products in the future. We also created a short, simple video that was shared with other farmers growing similar products, using this as an example to highlight the importance of input control with regards to food safety. With this intervention, we protected our clients from receiving poor quality goods, supported a farmer who didn’t have access to the same information, and prevented future incidences like this that could have led to food wastage.
What This All Means for WayCool
Honestly, business as usual. These are highly uncertain times, when Food Safety and Health are on top of everyone’s mind. This is also true for WayCool, but the difference is that we’ve been obsessing over this from the very beginning. Whether we are sourcing Dal from farmers in Madhya Pradesh or Tomatoes from farmers in Karnataka, our approach to Food Safety has been the same. Engaging with them before cultivation, tracking HOW products were handled across the entire value chain, and enforcing strict quality checks at incoming, in-process, and outgoing steps with a focus on education instead of penalization.
The COVID crisis caught the world, and us, by surprise. However, because we were practicing several of what are today’s norms, well ahead of time e.g. non contact hand sanitization, we have been able to realign our business faster to the new reality. What is new to many, was business as usual for us for the past few years, and we will continue to push the envelope through our multiple QC Labs and partnerships with respected organizations like the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University and the National Agro Foundation. Watch this space for further developments.
