Smart, Speedy and Safe: Tips for Getting Perishables to Market Quickly Without Going Bananas
If you’re a logistics professional managing a food and beverage supply chain, you have a lot on your plate. You have to get products to market as quickly as possible without compromising margins – all while managing the quality and safety consumers expect and deserve. Given all the complex food safety challenges facing the industry, the safety component of this equation may be the toughest to manage.
More and more we hear of food safety scares and recalls in the news. The threats are numerous and varied – whether it’s contaminated bagged lettuce, cantaloupe, peanut butter, seafood or tainted ingredients, keeping the food supply safe is paramount; the nation’s health depends on it. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), every year, one in six Americans (48 million people) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne diseases. Experts estimate reducing foodborne illness by just 10 percent would keep five million people healthier each year.
Meanwhile, as the nation’s food supply network expands, there’s mounting pressure on food and beverage supply chains to move perishables quickly and safely. So, how do you get products from the source to shelf (or refrigerator) without spoilage or loss? How do you balance quality, freshness, and safety with speed and cost control? For many, the secret is an optimized supply chain that minimizes risk, provides transparency across multiple tiers of suppliers and handoffs, and improves control from source to shelf. Consider these five tips for a safer, smarter, optimized food supply chain.
Five Tips for a Safer, Smarter Food Supply Chain
- Maintain temperature control: keeping perishables at the right temperature is essential to food safety. As a supply chain manager, this means managing temperature levels across every link in your supply chain: supplier, packaging center, distribution center, retailer, and in-transit. This means continuous management, because every time goods are “touched”, you’re exposed to the risk of damage.
- Tightly manage transportation: keeping food safe means maintaining the temperature in trucks and trailers at an appropriate range for every shipment. Grocers want products on their shelves during peak periods, not on trucks, so mode optimization that keeps in transit time to a minimum is critical to food safety and quality.
- Monitor/manage packaging: how perishables are packaged is directly linked to how they ship. Keeping perishables fresh means packaging them correctly to minimize touches and exposure to transport conditions. A good 3PL provider will help you determine how to package your perishables to ensure the contents arrive in optimal condition. They’ll also monitor the effectiveness of different types of packaging and offer packaging alternatives to prevent future damage to your perishables.
- Eliminate waste to control costs: many factors impact costs, from growing conditions to commodity prices to fuel, labor, freight, packaging and waste estimated to be in the billions of dollars. These impacts place pressure on supply chain managers to reduce costs.
- Comply with regulations: One of the biggest developments in food safety in recent years is the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), signed into law in 2011. The first major overhaul of its kind since the 1930s, the FSMA law aims to keep potentially harmful food from reaching consumers by shifting the focus from a reactive to a proactive state.
If you’re also looking to control costs, look for a partner that can help with packaging postponement. Postponing packaging or delivery as long as possible can effectively reduce inventory and costs.
Optimizing the supply chain to reduce waste is one of the best ways to keep costs under control and improve your competitive position and profitability. Optimization might mean integrated transportation, warehouse and forecasting solutions that get products to stores faster, preventing spoilage and maintaining product integrity.
The FSMA law requires shippers to use temperature-controlled trucks with on-board sensors to transport perishables at the proper temperature. Those temperatures must be monitored from the time products leave manufacturing facilities to when they reach store shelves. Food shippers also are subject to more inspections, record-keeping and testing.
Darin Cooprider is Vice President and General Manager, Consumer Packaged Goods at Ryder System, Inc. With more than 25 years of experience in food manufacturing, big box retail, strategy consulting and 3PL services, Darin has played an active role in developing and executing strategies to improve service, reduce costs and increase reliability across numerous industry segments.
