The Top Five Benefits of Traceability for Food & Beverage Manufacturers

Product and ingredient traceability is more important for food and beverage manufacturers than ever. From increased regulatory or legal requirements to rising consumer expectations, product and ingredient traceability is becoming less and less optional for manufacturers. Fortunately, increased traceability also offers significant benefits for your business.

Here are the top five benefits of increased traceability for food and beverage manufacturers.

1. Improved Traceability Provides Better Visibility and Transparency

Unsurprisingly, improved traceability provides better visibility and transparency. Traceability is the tracking and tracing of your supply data. It identifies all data relevant for the ingredients and materials used to manufacture and distribute your products.

Improved visibility into your supply chain can help streamline your business operations and identify additional efficiencies that can reduce costs.

2. Automated Traceability Helps Businesses Improve Regulatory Compliance

As previously mentioned, improved traceability can help businesses improve regulatory and legal compliance. Automated traceability using software can increase regulatory and legal compliance, so you don’t have to worry about fines or fees. Software will record all the relevant data to ensure full forward and backward traceability, including material lots, quantities, test results, and process parameters.

Using software to automatically track compliance removes much of the hassle of managing product traceability and makes things easier on management and employees.

3. Traceability can Help Push Your Business Toward Increased Automation and Technological Adoption

It’s easier and cheaper to prevent problems than fix them. Sometimes it’s hard to make the business case for increased investment in new software and automation when the benefits will accrue over time rather than being immediately apparent. Increasing traceability requirements can help incentivize businesses to take steps that will also help their bottom line.

Investing in technology like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software can help improve visibility into real-time data and your operational processes. It can help you track trends and identify risks before they happen. With complete visibility into your operational and financial data, as well as your supply chain, you’ll be able to identify additional insights and areas for improvement.

4. Add Value by Creating Better Customer Relationships

Customers have higher expectations about corporate responsibility and produce traceability. Providing information about ingredient sourcing and product traceability upfront can increase consumer trust in your products and gives your marketing department more options for branding. Increased traceability can help your business identify issues before products hit the shelves, preventing a loss in consumer confidence. No food and beverage company wants to be involved in a food safety recall, but if one happens, having robust traceability and full visibility into data like lot numbers and product locations can help companies respond swiftly to any problems. This can help restore your company’s reputation after a crisis.

End-to-end value chain traceability can help your business demonstrate your trustworthiness to both retailers and consumers. It can help your build your long-term brand value.

5. Increased Traceability can Accelerate the Digital Transformation

The key to effective traceability is having access to accurate, real-time information. This is only possible with the use of technology across your business. Implementing software like an ERP allows data from a barcode scanned in Spain to be almost immediately available to employees at your corporate headquarters anywhere in the world.

This gives your company a huge competitive advantage because you’ll be able to make decisions in real time with accurate, current data, not based on last month’s or even last week’s projections. This type of worldwide and end-to-end traceability is only possible with a company-wide digital transformation.

Additional Insights on Product Traceability;

A recent report found 96% of surveyed food and beverage companies are focused on improving visibility while 56% of manufacturers are still relying on manual processes for traceability. That leaves a lot of room for improvement, and for companies to realize increased gains in efficiency through the use of software.

How We Can Help

At CertiPro, we’re experts in helping companies apply technology solutions to streamline operations, increase automation, and resolve bottlenecks and pain points. We specialize in Sage ERP software, which provides real-time data visibility across your business and improves product traceability for food and beverage manufacturers. If you’d like to contact us to schedule a demo or learn more about what Sage software can do for you, please click the buttons below.