Cargill has released an assessment tool to help food and beverage customers achieve their growth, cost reduction and risk mitigation goals by identifying, prioritizing and quantifying risks and opportunities in its supply chains.
Packaging has a vital role to play in minimizing food waste in the supply chain, according to new research by RMIT University. The University's Centre for Design conducted the Australian-first research, commissioned by CHEP Australia, showing where and why food waste occurs along both the fresh and manufactured food supply chain.
What if you weren't just delivering meat to stores for sale but doing something more disruptive - like selling 40-pound packages of raw meat out of the back of refrigerated trucks? What kind of bureaucratic fat would you have to cut through then?
Ask any food industry executive to cite his or her greatest concern, and the answer will almost always be the same: product safety. But the list doesn't stop there. Like any other business sector, food manufacturers are grappling with a number of challenges, many of them related to the age of the internet and social media.
The food supply chain has been a hot topic recently, with the horsemeat scandal creating a whirlwind of interest in an area which before had ticked along without very much attention at all.
As tainted-food scandals go, it wasn't so bad. The discovery early this year of unlabeled horse meat in European food products wasn't for the most part a safety issue. It was a violation of cultural norms, to be sure, as well as a truth-in-packaging problem. Most of all, it was a supply-chain failure.
There are several overarching themes driving the push for more automation inside the four walls. Some relate to changing demographics in the labor force, others to how consumers are shopping today, and let's not overlook the constant striving for more efficiency, productivity and cost reduction.
Grocery stores and other retail food sellers are losing as much as $15bn a year in unsold fruits and vegetables alone, with about half of the U.S. supply going uneaten, according to an analysis on food waste by the National Resources Defense Council.
When rain doesn't fall in Iowa, it's not just Des Moines that starts fretting. Food buyers from Addis Ababa to Beijing all are touched by the fate of the corn crop in the U.S., the world's breadbasket in an era when crop shortages mean riots.