What Impact Can Compliance Technologies Have on Grocery Retail Food Safety?
To answer this question, it is important to first understand the degree of difficulty grocers have in managing the entire spectrum of food safety. The grocery business is quite complex. Grocery retailers have extensive supply chains, with ultra-wide product ranges that bring tremendous logistical challenges. Think about it! They must procure tens of thousands of products and ingredients throughout all the departments in the store.
To date, most grocers do an admirable job in food safety. Especially considering the current state of legacy controls for operational processes, methods and technologies that they use today. These controls require improvements to address changing risks to innovate and reduce the complexities of in-store production.
The largest controllable expense in a supermarket is still labor? We have all read about how hard it is to recruit, train and retain talent. However, the labor market has reached critical mass in terms of keeping the doors open in brick and mortar stores. This is partly due to a robust economy and business expansion. However, experts have predicted this for over a decade. What this means to grocers is that they must be able to do more with fewer and more capable people. They must also nurture and retain this talent to ensure rigorous methods to produce safe food.
The Gen X, Gen Y and Millennial generations grew up in the mobility revolution. They are adept with using mobile technologies. You might say they are already experts. So, should you really expect them to abandon these technologies when working in a store?
The answer is a resounding no! We want to leverage this talent by enabling workers to use mobility devices, supplied by retailers, in their everyday jobs. That means retailers need to replace manual methods with modern processes that engage employees and enhance their skills. These new interactive technologies place real-time data at their fingertips to advance their productivity and job satisfaction. If you don’t do that, they will go to work for a retailer that does!
Considering the operational complexity and logistics, tools that help you retain talent can become a boon by creating an inviting work environment that compels them to be successful.
On any given day (or hour), a ball can drop, that might create a food safety non-compliance risk in your stores. For example, a new employee, thrust into a job at the store during a holiday, typically gets abbreviated wing-concept training. They are not fully trained on ALL aspects of their job, such as when a recipe calls for an ingredient that is out of stock in the back room. They often seek advice and may have an associate says, “No problem, just get it off the shelf…we can write it up as in-store purchase.” However, the shelf ingredient may have different nutrition and/or an allergens that may harm the shopper and add risks because the nutritional label is now not correct. Is this a lack of training, wrong-doing or that they are just overwhelmed?
Anyone who’s worked a retail holiday season knows that the only way to service customers is to bring in additional people to supplement the store staff. Training is often superficial at best and for things like food safety completely lacking. What if guidance and training is provided real-time at point of production with an active engagement strategy?
Fresh Item Management (FIM) systems provide point-of-production guidance. For example, when making a fresh product, the production forecast system provides details on easily accessible screens. The employee can click to get more real-time information to produce the item to exact standards. Many even roll up the use of ingredients to orders to reduce ingredient issues mentioned above. Plus, key hazards can be mitigated by an employee self-certifying that they completed the production as specified. This provides employee ownership, accountability and confidence that are doing a great job of supplying safe products.
Also, new production systems provide the data that is needed to verify a food safety plan. That plan includes training needed at point of production. That’s good because supervisory oversight is typically too busy to keep on top of everything. That includes using this data with emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to manage compliance and monitor food safety and FIM production plans.
What are these new AI compliance systems?
Cloud-based food safety solutions implement quickly and use current organization infrastructure, people, hierarchies and technologies to improve compliance. These food safety solutions are foundation platforms to improve the business without having to implement wholly integrated complex IT solutions. Of course, some integration can help but they are self-sufficient by their nature. They reside in the cloud and provide an umbrella technology that overlays compliance automation by closing gaps in food safety plans or non-compliance in operational applications.
How do they do that?
To find out, tune in to my next blog about how grocers can implement advanced food safety in the cloud. A clue can be found in the image you see in this blog.