With increasing scrutiny focused on food safety, regulatory standards and to avoid food recalls, as well as wavering consumer trust in food products, dairy processors should examine their established food safety practices and systems to ensure they’re up to par.
Achieving ingredient traceability depends on many factors such as longstanding, sustainable relationships with farmers and suppliers, accurate data collection and record keeping, as well as the type of raw material needed.
In the CBS series “Without a Trace” which aired from 2002–2009, a specially trained FBI Missing Persons Squad searches for missing people by applying advanced psychological profiling to reveal the victims’ lives.
The dairy industry, along with the broad food industry, is on its way toward a more traceable supply chain. The FDA's New Era of Smarter Food Safety Blueprint outlines a goal for the food industry to track and trace foods from farm to fork with the help of computer-based technology. The International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) has supported the blueprint since its release in July 2020.
An end-to-end system that tracks processing from raw materials through to packaging becomes an immensely important tool to ensure safety and consistency in a dairy processing facility.
Both retailers and consumers of dairy foods and beverages are increasingly aware of what traceability means. In this guest blog, an executive from Tetra Pak writes that the same process control system that aids in formulation control can also be used to establish traceability.