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.

When evaluating the performance effectiveness of current DC processes and procedures, it is critical to maintain a positive atmosphere.

Supply chain is the largest expense for any product company and generally accounts for 60 percent to 90 percent of all costs. Controlling such a substantial expense demands continuous performance improvement and high operational efficiency. Research suggests the existence of a statistically significant relationship between analytical capabilities and supply chain performance. In other words, data analysis can assist in controlling supply chain costs. Further, an analysis of 310 companies from different industries in the USA, Europe, Canada, Brazil and China indicates that analytics of the supply chain plan has the second-biggest influence on supply chain performance.

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.