From Farm to Fork: Tech-Driven Traceability in the Food Chain

In this episode of Supply Chain Visibility Stories, host Bill Wohl explores the intersection of food safety, traceability, and technology with Jean Duckett of Avery Dennison and John DiPalo of ACSIS. Discover how end-to-end data integration, transparency standards, and sustainability practices are reshaping food supply chains—from compliance to consumer trust.

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Narrator:

Welcome to the supply chain visibility stories, the podcast for supply chain managers, brought to you by ACSIS, the 100% supply chain visibility cloud solution provider, supply chain visibility stories is hosted by Bill Wohl, a technology industry veteran and enterprise software professional.

Bill Wohl:

Thanks, everyone, for joining us. Today marks the next in a series of discussions exploring the intersection of technology and business. Our discussions are designed to be brief and focused, and we're hoping this podcast format inspires our audience to think about how technology impacts their own organizations and to engage with us as our series continues. I'll have information about how to engage with this series and our guests at the end of today's discussion. My name is Bill Wohl, and I'm honored to be the host of this series brought to you by ACSIS. I'm always fascinated by the business challenges faced by companies and how those challenges can be addressed by technology. We started our series by looking at some of the macro trends facing companies today, including the impact of the pandemic and how that's been driving a renewed focus on global supply chains. Since then, we've been digging a bit deeper. Today, we welcome two guests: John Dipalo, ACSIS's chief strategy officer, and Jean Duckett of Avery Dennison, senior manager of traceability and transparency technologies. So, let's start John with you. Welcome. Welcome back to the program.

John Dipalo:

Thanks, Bill. Good to be back.

Bill Wohl:

So, let's set the stage. We've been talking about filling the gaps in transparency and the supply chain and in particular how companies can think about that effort from concept to execution. Today, we're going to dig a little further into what's going on and in particular issues around food packaging and food safety. Why is that so important in today's market?

John Dipalo:

Yeah, I think, Bill that's an interesting topic. Food safety and food traceability have become more of a concern. In recent times as the delivery method for food has changed as you know the amount of food moving through the supply chain you know has changed and and just we also have the FDA starting to look at new rules and regulations around the new era of food safety and I'm really excited to be talking with Jeannie today because she's a true expert in the space and I think she'll give us some great insight on what the changes are around food delivery, food safety and food traceability. And how that can impact companies and how companies should think about the intersection of applying technology to that problem as well as standards so that that information can be shared you know across multiple stakeholders

Bill Wohl:.

All right, sounds good. Let's bring Jean in. Jean, welcome to the program. Let's start by talking about your company. Tell us a little bit about Avery Denison.

Jean Duckett:

Well, thank you Bill. So, Avery Denison is actually quite an old company. We've been in business for over 80 years. And we are a large company and we have obviously multiple different divisions. So Avery Dennison's primarily is a material company that we do a lot of research into FID labels. We're the world's largest RFID manufacturer. But my role in the identification solutions group is really understanding how to identify products as they move through the supply chain and what it's going to take to drive an interoperable supply chain for the food industry. 

Bill Wohl:

You know, we've been talking on this podcast series, Jean, about a variety of industries, and it struck me that food safety, like chemical product safety, and like transportation safety. A lot of the issues are really common here. Shippers, receivers, and everyone in between are concerned with where products are, are they safe in transport, how do we build in sustainability practices, and how do we make that all come together with technology, but what makes food particularly unique?

Jean Duckett:

Well, there's a couple of things that make food particularly unique, Bill. And that was a very good observation on this whole concept of traceability because the concept of the underlining technologies between traceability is the same no matter what your industry. Whether you're looking at a shirt and you're trying to determine if the cotton was from Wan, China, or if you're looking at food. But some of the particular challenges in food that don't impact like the drug supply chain or the apparel industry as much is there are many more players involved. So you have growers you know where the food starts that then go to like a cooling house and then they pass up to seven eight times they change hands on their way to the conser. And so that presents a unique challenge that doesn't really exist in the pharmaceutical supply chain or in the apparel supply chain, which are much more vertically integrated. Then, of course, food has to be maintained as you pointed out at temperatures which is going to make it more difficult.

Bill Wohl:

So all along those steps of the supply chain, there's an opportunity for technology to provide data and information. Is the vast majority of it around time and temperature and storage, or is it really more about where the product is at that moment and moving or it is a combination of all of those factors?

Jean Duckett:

Well, today, a lot of the information that you are generating is really been focused on the supply chain or the business functionality and the food safety people haven't been involved as much but you correctly pointed out Bill that in the new era smarter food safety, that this is beginning to change. And so what you saw since you were dealing with supply chain people are supply chain factors, such as receipt ship returns, you know, and that type of information. Now that they're starting to talk and integrate food safety into it more, you can start to integrate verification of hazardous analysis and critical control point steps or good agricultural procedures and have that information travel with that item through the supply chain.

Bill Wohl:

But like other products where supply chain focuses on rapid delivery because there's just in time manufacturing steps when it comes to food products, there is this issue of finding the maximum life for food. So ringing out the speed of the supply chain and understanding the length of products in transit becomes particularly important.

Jean Duckett:

Well time that is a very good call. Well life of food is a very complex subject and it actually has multiple factors impacting it including temperature different types of emission of gasses wrap. But just go back to your point about shelf life. Theree was an ECR loss center in Europe that did a study, which I talk about quite frequently and it's referenced out on the web. They showed that if you reduce or increase onshelf availability life, so they have this term called onshelf availability life by one day, you cut food waste by 42%.

Bill Wohl:

Wow, that's pretty impressive. So not only are the participants in the supply chain looking to bring together this data of all of this information about items that are in the supply chain. But increasingly, the documentation of food safety issues becomes a component of managing the supply chain, right? Because governments and agencies insist that the players along the line can document every step of the supply chain. That's unique to the food industry as well. Correct?

Jean Duckett:

It's somewhat unique to the food industry. You always have things, like right now, the United States won't allow the import of cotton from certain regions of the world. So, you can't import a shirt made out of that material. And then there's always things like conflict metals, but it's particularly difficult in the food industry once again because the number of times that product changes hand. So, I recently worked on a seafood traceability program where the food was in four different countries before it was imported into the United States. So, it went to four different countries. Four steps of processing and try to maintain that unbroken chain of custody requires standards because you're be having so many people touch it.

Bill Wohl:

I suspect that we could spend an entire podcast - maybe even seven podcasts on the subject of standards. But we often talk in this podcast series about the challenges in the supply chain of a variety of systems bringing data points forward. And being integrated. Can you give us an example of the challenges between all of these individual point solutions and when a supply chain is truly integrated from a data perspective?

Jean Duckett:

Definitely, I recently worked with a really large  QSR here in the United States and they were discussing with me that they had invested actually quite a bit of money on temperature systems with Bluetooth and GPS for their pallets so that they can track their food with the pallet to get a better idea of what we were talking about that visibility into the supply chain. Where are their products? When is it going to be arriving out of DC? When's it going to be delivered to a store? , but then they were sharing with me a frustration that they couldn't really leverage that data with any of the rest of their data. And I'm like, well, that's because you looked at solving a problem uniquely to solving a problem. You wanted to know where your pallets were. So, someone sold you a solution to tell you where your pallets were. And instead of saying I want to I'm looking at this as a component of my entire supply chain, and I want just this data on my product as it's moving through the supply chain and putting it in a different format that might be more leverable.

Bill Wohl:

So I think you're making a really important point here, Jean, because we often talk about the unique business challenge you talked about with pallet location. We talked in an earlier podcast about damage of audio auto parts in transit, but if you're managing the total supply chain. You're certainly interested at each point along the supply chain or the issues you're facing, but at some point you need to step back and think holistically about how to manage the entire supply chain end to end. And that's what you mean when you talk about an integrated solution. Correct?

Jean Duckett:

That's correct. What you would like to do, and this is why bringing those food safety people in, as John referred to, is so critical because they have been doing this since the 70s, is come up with a food process map and draw the map the flow of how your products end up from source into your facility. And then what they'll do is analyze what the critical control points are in that food process map. Whether it's temperature control for distribution, non-integration or non-contamination during when you're making a salad, whatever your critical control point is. And then you can go to the technologist and say this is my map. I need to track this information from here to here, and I would like to tie proof into that this is organic that it has no crosscontamination that this is the allergen and how do I do that?

Bill Wohl:

So people need to start changing the questions they're asking

right and focus on their technology investments so that they come together rather than a series of disparate projects.

Jean Duckett:

Correct. Yeah. And look at what your overall objective are. So if your objective is to verify to consers that you really have organic produce and that it's peanut free or nut-ree or allergen free. Then focus on how you're going to tie that information, what information you need to on as it comes through the supply chain so you can deliver that information to a regulatory body to a conumser to your instore marketing people whoever needs that information.

So before we wrap up today I do want to ask you one additional question because in many of these podcast, we've talked to industry experts like yourself about a topic that is increasingly becoming important in supply chains, which is sustainability and packaging.  What advice can you give people about how technology plays a role in the sustainability topic?

Jean Duckett:

Well, technology is critical in sustainability.  and there's some fascinating work in other areas like construction and stuff, but limited to food. What you're going to see is sustainability in two ways. You're going to see that the packaging is developed to keep your products fresher, your fresh produce, to maintain that product, to reduce outgassing and to control the things that packaging can do to keep that more product more viable longer to reduce that food waste. And the other thing you're going to see is you're going to see a lot more both supply chain applications for reusable containers as well as consumer applications for reusable containers. So you're going to be able to start seeing you know drop off points and you already are in some of your quicks serve restaurants here in the United States and Europe where you might have a reusable coffee mug and when you drop that coffee mug off you get credited back to your account the deposit on that coffee mug. Well, in the future you could see where multiple QSRs use the same type of serving devices and people just drop it off wherever they happen to be at the mall, at an airport, wherever they are and they're credited back that deposit.

Bill Wohl:

And for our audience, just because the points you've made have been so compelling. The term QSR, what does that stand for?

JeanDuckett:

Quick service restaurant.

Bill Wohl:

Got it. Okay, good. This has been very interesting. And I think, Jeanie, what we're going to discover is there's a wealth of opportunity in the topics we've covered around traceability, sustainability, food safety documentation to explore additional podcasts. But John, the discussion, always leads back to there are so many ways a supply chain can be integrated with technology and all of this information can come forward. It could be a little daunting to companies to figure out, where do I get started? What's your advice for people in the food safety or food supply chain space? How do they get started on this journey?

John Dipalo:

Bill, I think that there's you know, there's an a lot of resources, you know, that are out there available, you know, for people to to take a look at, you know, what is coming up from a regulatory perspective, you know, what standards are out there. You know, the new era of smarter food safety from the FDA is is a good place to to take a look at, you know, and and subscribing to, you know, their emails and understanding some of the different use cases that are coming and some of the different technology uses and things like that. , but, you know, as always, the way that I like to think about things, you know, when you're looking to get started, and I think Jeanie made some great points about taking a look at the process map, understanding the flow of product through your facilities and when they're in your chain of custody, and then looking at how can I capture the information in a way that will facilitate, you know, mandates or other requirements that are coming from government agencies, but also taking a look at those same processes and understanding how putting technology and putting traceability in place will serve as an as a catalyst for a significant return on investment for your own company. Because again, what we find is that compliance-driven solutions tend to be very point specific, whereas ROI driven solutions can be holistic across the enterprise and that's the way that I like to think about things. So if you can start to generate some savings and generate some you know some some process improvement through the through the use of the technology as well as leveraging you know what is coming down from a regulatory perspective you're going to be way ahead of the game and it will become ingrained in your processes versus something that I have to do in order to support a reporting mandate or or a regulation or something along those lines. So again, let's come back to thinking about how operational excellence can be worked into this process and benefits to not only the company but the entire supply chain.

Bill Wohl:

And of course John choosing the right partners to have with you along the journey will be important. So our thanks to Jean Ducket of Avery Denison and of course to our repeat guest John Dipalo, Chief Strategy Officer at ACSIS. That wraps up today's podcast. My thanks to ACSIS for making this podcast series possible. We welcome your comments and questions about the discussions on these podcasts. You can engage with us at the official ACSIS Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Be part of the discussion. I'm your host, Bill Wohl. And for everyone at ACSIS, thanks for joining. We look forward to our next podcast. Talk soon. 

Narrator:

Thank you for listening to Supply Chain Visibility Stories brought to you by ACSIS, the 100% supply chain visibility cloud solution provider. Visit us on the web at ACSISinc.com or join the dialogue on social media. Look for ACSIS Inc. on LinkedIn and Twitter. Join us next time for supply chain visibility stories brought to you by ACSIS.