Food and Beverage brands are uniquely responsible for producing and consuming their products…
Throughout the pandemic, Food and Beverage businesses have experienced enormous pressure to transform their supply chains and elevate their services – to improve convenience, experience, and safety. With dwindling budgets and increasing demand for flexible pick-up and delivery services, business leaders need to know where to invest their time and money to generate the most immediate returns and significantly impact their operations.
IT Pro Portal states that…
“The IoT and Artificial Intelligence are helping companies to reach high levels of food safety, improve traceability, cut down wastage, and reduce costs and risks across the various stages of food processing and packaging.”
This blog will expand on the critical transformations in the Food & Beverage market and specifically look at the technologies businesses can be utilizing to maximise their returns.
1) Ingredient Traceability and food Safety
2) Transportation & Distribution
3) Inventory Management For Perishable Goods
4) I Want To Improve My Food Supply Chain
Ingredients Traceability & Food Safety
RFID technology is an exciting innovation for food and beverage businesses. From a production aspect, it presents an opportunity for companies to improve their warehouse management through automation while tracking the journey of their products and ingredients in real-time.
In the article Innovative Solutions for The Wine Sector, Science Direct states that…
“It is generally important to ensure a proper traceability of the [food supply chain] and thus provide key information for customers’ choices: the final customer has a right to know if her/his goods have been exposed to events that might have affected its qualitative properties.”
Not only is traceability important for assuring quality, but it is also essential for the safety of consumers. Effective tracking technologies can help business leaders adapt to the regulatory scrutiny brought to bear on companies worldwide for allergen control purposes. In Europe, from October 2021, the introduction of Natasha’s Law will pressure food and beverage businesses to have more accurate visibility of allergens’ existence (or nonexistence) in their products, from farm to fork. Effective RFID and RTLS solutions can deliver that oversight.
Tracking High-Value Items
It might seem out of the ordinary for a supermarket. Still, for auction houses and vintage wine sellers, etc., RFID tagging technology can stretch beyond the initial trackability of ingredients to enable item authentication, anti-counterfeiting processes, and security assurances (giving you sight of exactly where your items are when).
Transportation & Distribution
From a transportation and distribution perspective, RFID technology can be combined with mobile devices, software, and connectivity solutions to enable route optimisation (inside and outside the four walls of your warehouse), paperless logs, and real-time location information, amongst other things. Perhaps most importantly, transportation units can be fitted with sensor technologies that ensure conditions are suited to the qualitative elements of being transported.
With visibility of product journeys and processes along the way, management can make more informed and impactful decisions to improve the day-to-day running of operations.
Inventory Management For Perishable Goods
Much like the safe storage of vaccines and medical equipment, the food and beverage supply chain requires a proactive response to inventory management. With most decision-makers constantly looking for better ways to manage foodborne illness from contamination and total food waste, businesses need to move away from manual inventory management processes towards automated logs that can actively inform teams of the status of their goods.
Boris Shiklo from Smart Industry stated that…
“Food, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, nanomaterials, and other products with limited shelf life require constant location traceability and storage-environment monitoring. Businesses can turn to RFID and IoT technologies to gain better visibility into the location and the condition of perishable inventory items.”
How Can I Start Making Improvements Today?
MiTEQ works with UK business leaders in the food and beverage sector. Below are some of the critical areas in which we are helping decision-makers to make improvements:
– Warehouse Handling
– Food Hygiene and safety
– Distribution/ Transportation
– Inventory Management
– Order Fulfilment
If you’d like to support improving your operational processes – through immediate sourcing of consumables or strategizing for more significant developments – reach out to the MiTEQ team via info@miteq.co.uk or by visiting the Contact Us section of our website.
