Data Readiness and Digitization for Food Producers

Last week, we held an engaging panel discussion with leading industry food manufacturers about how digitizing their food safety program enhanced their visibility and output and freed up resources. Mérieux NutriSciences hosted the conversation with participation from BioMérieux. 

In this blog, we’ll uncover some key takeaways from the discussion. 

Leading up to the panel discussion, Will Melnyczenko, Global Business Development Director, shared important context relating to the value of data readiness and digitalization in your operation: 

“Testing finished products, as well as monitoring your food production environment for pathogens and spoilage organisms, is key to ensuring consumer safety, as we all know… But we know that the data associated with this surveillance and the corrective actions tied to that data can quickly become burdensome to manage, especially with the manual approach. We found that many food producers use pen and paper or a plain Excel file – where errors can occur and time is zapped by reformatting and oftentimes not backed up, at risk for lost information.”

According to bioMérieux’s digital readiness survey polled 344 respondents, 87% of respondents said their environmental monitoring programs are not digitally optimized. Breaking the survey results down further, 30% of respondents shared they are using a manual approach with just pen and paper, and 56% use a spreadsheet-style approach like Excel. 

MeInyczenko touches on the FDA’s proposed Food Traceability rule published in September 2020. While the FDA currently has food traceability requirements, the proposed update is intended to enhance traceability recordkeeping for certain identified foods beyond a limited “one-up, one-back” traceback approach.

“Technology-enabled traceability will increase food traceability, including rapid tracebacks and identifying specific data sources. The ultimate goal is for the FDA to be able to quickly remove products from the marketplace, when necessary, to prevent any injuries to human health.”

Given this context, the panelists were asked to speak on their methods for digitizing their systems in their facilities. The panel included: 

• Wendy Bigala, Corporate Microbiology Program Manager, North America, OSI Group  
• Ledon Black, Microbiologist Specialist, Hill’s Pet Nutrition
• Sarah Burt, Senior Microbiologist, Lamb Weston Corporate: Food Protection
• Michele Sayles, Ph.D.,  Executive Director of Food Safety and Quality, Diamond Pet Food
• Kris Young- Manager, Food Safety & Microbiology Product Safety, Quality, & Regulatory, Hill’s Pet Nutrition

The panelists were asked three questions related to their environmental monitoring program. Read below to see their answers—access the entire webinar and discussion here. 

Question 1: What are the top advantages your company has seen through digitizing your environmental monitoring program?

Bigala: I’ve worked with Enviromap with two companies over the past eight years, and there are great advantages to using a digital platform. First and foremost, you want to make sure you use a platform that can support your current and future growth by selecting a company with a platform that can provide technical support as you grow.

The advantages of this are that you can centralize your data. Suppose you are a company that’s on a global or national platform with many locations within your organizations across North America. In that case, you can centralize the visibility, and the trending of data across many locations, which is key. You can change the culture to a data-driven culture to help meet these changing and shifting regulations and requirements. It improves collaboration both at the national level and globally.

Sayles: Wendy mentioned a term that is near and dear to my heart, and that’s being data-driven. And unlike my colleagues here today, I’m probably the rookie in the group when it comes to Enviromap because we have only been tinkering with it for about a year and a half. In today’s realm, I’ve been doing food safety for over 20 years, and one thing that keeps coming back is making decisions. How do you make decisions? Having scientific evidence to support those decisions or to back those decisions, the rationale is important.

One of the nice things is the visual aspect, looking at how we can change things up. We have to relay messages to management, who may not understand our vocabulary or know what we do daily. So this helps us be able to show the amount of work that we do… And so, I would say probably for us, and for our company, it’s just been a tool to wrap your arms around information and utilize it more efficiently.

Burt: For our company, to touch on what Wendy and Michelle talked about, there’s been a big push for standardization between all of our facilities. And this program allows us to have that standardization so that data is collected in the same way, and it’s presented in the same way. We can look at it the same way across all facilities and at different aspects. The big portion of it that we utilize in our company is standardization.

Young: For us, the key was that we wanted to be able to use the data to make data-driven decisions. But for us, first, how do we get there? And the biggest advantage for us with Envriomap was that we eliminated many of those manual tasks that took forever for our teams to do.

They spent more time updating spreadsheets when we were a more manual program. They spent more time transferring CoA data to the spreadsheet and didn’t have much time to focus on looking at it because they spent so much time inputting it into a spreadsheet. Of course, in addition to doing all the corrective actions. And so, for us, the big push was this would eliminate that and make it more efficient for us to be able to then look at the data and help us to focus on that. Versus, oh, my goodness, I’ve got to enter all this information into the spreadsheet, then I’m tired of looking at it. At that point, you’re not getting the value out of the information. So that was the big push for us there so that we could become more and more data-driven, more deep data focus.

Black: I’ll add the need for data in real time. So, when the data comes in through Enviromap, it’s updated every 24 hours. So, you don’t have to spend time waiting for data to come in, or you don’t have to spend time entering data. So, the data comes to you in real time, and it just populates into Enviromap, so you can use that data to do anything to improve your processes.

Question 2: Were there any challenges in communicating with your nonfood science leadership about the need for data readiness? And if there were, how did you overcome those?

Bigala: It’s important to communicate with the senior leadership team or corporate team to show them the governance around the system, speak to the data when you have audits, whether it’s a third-party audit, whether it’s the FDA coming into your facility, the system does come in handy. Having that system to show how you’re managing your data and taking a preventive approach to use data to identify, not as a reactive organization, but a proactive one. The data can help you to become more proactive in your decision-making.

It can help you look at the controls you have in place to see how effective they are. Are there other measurements we can use that we have identified to make processes more robust?  You can speak with the data to show them the ROI for acquiring and implementing these systems and the governance that comes with it because corporate has many questions. They cannot see the paper. They will not come in and look at spreadsheets and paper, but dashboards can be built when you have a system like EnviroMap. So corporate can fully view your KPIs and key performance indicators. Or they can build other indicators to look at it from a proactive approach to say, hey, do we have activity here?

Enviromap is a company with technical experts who can work with you to customize dashboards so that you can see them from any view you desire. And their team can work with you to set up those dashboards for your factory level and then for your corporate level to see and link them to other systems. 

Question 3: According to the bioMérieux digital readiness survey, 87% of food manufacturers reported using manual or electronic log-based (i.e., Excel) systems for the EMP – does this surprise you? What advice would you give someone that is considering an investment in EnviroMap? 

Black: It does not surprise me because I lived there just last year. And it was time-consuming to enter, and all that data, and trying to track and trend then, and not being able to analyze the data as we want to. My advice is that since joining Hills, I realized that this program is excellent. You get a great return on investment because you spend less time doing the things that are mundane or the things that are more time-consuming rather than analyzing the data. So, with the new tool, I think you can analyze the data better. As Wendy said, the data is there for you to make proactive decisions, not reactive ones.

Watch the entire discussion below.