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The Manleys know they have no time to lose in getting Will Foods up to speed if they want to be serious players. High on their agenda is federal food safety regulations. By the end of 2015, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will require food distributors to have a system in place that tracks the exact quantity of each product in the warehouse at any given time, and where each specific product has been from inception to consumer sale, says Bob Manley, Will Foods’ executive vice president. Full product traceability is essential to food safety and is a system that the company has already implemented and is currently improving.
Scranton, S.C.-based W. Lee Flowers and Co., which operates or supplies 90 IGA/KJ’s Market and independent supermarkets in the Carolinas and Georgia, recently selected Salt Lake City, Utah-basedPark City Group’s tracking platform to manage their food safety-related risk. The track and trace system identifies the supply chain path taken by a product in the event of a product recall. It can reduce the risk in the supply chain by identifying backward chaining sources and forward chaining recipients of products in near real time.
“With the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSA) regulations now requiring us to store and manage literally thousands of vendor documents, we knew we had to eliminate the paper shuffle happening on both sides of our business,” said Henry Johnson, president of W. Lee Flowers. “We chose the ReposiTrak solution for its automation and validation capabilities. We like that the dashboards and alerts enable one person to stay on top of missing, expired, or inaccurate documents.”
Will Foods and W. Lee Flowers and Co. are among many industry professionals that have begun a journey that could pay big dividends if executed correctly. While the goal of a traceability system is to improve food safety, the end result could be a system that improves the efficiencies of managing inventory throughout the supply chain.
