43% of grocers say the lack of inventory visibility is among the top challenges they face. The same percentage of retail supply chain professionals say the technology they have in place isn’t enough to keep up with business demands.  

These were just some of the struggles revealed in research featured in a 2018 Progressive Grocer article. Three years later, the same challenges still exist for the industry. 

While there’s technology available to help solve this problem, achieving end-to-end visibility is still a struggle for supply chains. We’ll look at how visibility impacts supply chain coordination during a food safety event and what solutions are out there so you can build the supply chain resilience necessary to protect your business and customers, especially during a recall alert.

Food Traceability & Food Safety: Current State

Public health is the number one issue right now, without question. Food recalls have increased over the past decade, gaps in food traceability processes remain. Specifically when it comes to supply chain communication and collaboration.

Supply chains are complex because you have multiple actors, thousands of products, and various touch points that all need to be tracked and managed. On top of that, all of the people and companies who make up a supply chain are each using specific technology, transportation, and communication methods. In fact, the process has become so siloed, interaction between individuals in the supply chain managing the same product is rare. This lack of visibility and coordination is what can cause the delays which can lead to food safety events, specifically in fresh produce.

This siloed approach to supply chain management needs to end. It prohibits a full-picture view of any single product journey. To enhance food safety in your supply chain, you need to break down those silos and implement a new, full-path traceability approach with real-time shared data on a unified platform that benefits everyone in the chain.

Supply Chain Collaboration Technology 

Managing a supply chain is a team effort, so everyone needs to have the ability to see who is doing what and which products are where in order to build and achieve resilience and collaboration. Knowing that visibility is the main obstacle that keeps communication and transparency from happening, you need to find a digital solution that can help you remove that barrier easily.

For example, iTradeNetwork just enhanced its traceability platform to include the industry’s first label-less traceability solutions and instant recall and incident management technology. These new, innovative solutions provide buyers and suppliers with the tools needed to not only act fast during a food safety event, but collaborate instantly to identify the impacted product anywhere it exists in the supply chain so definitive action can be taken within minutes. This is the result of having access to unified data on a single platform, so the entire supply chain can see the same information at the same time. No more silos.

The Results: Increased Food Safety, Increased Profits

While cost was considered a challenge for adopting modern traceability technology, it’s no longer an excuse. New technologies and solutions have changed traceability from an expense that negatively impacts profits, to a wise investment that actually increases your bottom line.

Recently, iTradeNetwork helped implement an enhanced traceability program with a major global retailer, and the results were remarkable.The program not only brought food traceability gains for the company but also drove up profits by an average of 55 percent within the 12 month period, with some suppliers increasing volume by as much as 300%.

But that is just the beginning. Now with iTrade’s new traceability platform that includes Label-less Trace, Protein Trace, and Recall & Incident Management, you can achieve bigger results, faster. 

Investing in new food traceability technology allows you to gain the real-time visibility you need to mobilize your supply chain instantly and collaborate with more precision during a food safety event.

If you’re ready to enhance food safety and transform your traceability process, contact iTrade today to learn more about the most trusted and complete solution in the industry.