Protecting your Brand
No one wants to distribute a dangerous or defective product, but with modern food manufacturing occurring on such a large scale, mistakes are easily made. Unfortunately, even a small mistake can affect millions of consumers. Paragon’s award winning Food Traceability system can track food items from cradle to grave, keeping your company compliant.
With the release of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) in 2011, the FDA mandated that businesses not only recall all unsafe foods, but must avoid causing contamination in the first place during production or shipment. Unfortunately, when so many growers, distributors, and manufacturers share their foods in a global market, preventing and managing recalls is a complicated process. Each company is required to know which products are faulty, which lots they came from, where the foods were shipped and where they are being sold. Businesses using non-automated methods of recall often waste more than necessary, or fail to react fast enough to prevent illness.
According to statistics, integrating data collection software into food production and manufacturing protocols can help solve this problem, decreasing the negative financial and public-opinion backlash from spoiled produce. By performing a recall quickly and efficiently, a company can reduce the costs associated with lost product and production time, as well as minimize damage to its reputation.
The system you choose to record, track, and operate your supply chain is vital to recall management. Thanks to Paragon’s innovative Food Traceability Solution, businesses of any size can afford to invest in an automated tracking system.
Blueberries and the Barcode: How One Farm Grew with Paragon
Food traceability is about more than compliance with government regulations: it’s also about building customer relationships and fostering consumer trust. People want to know what they’re eating, where it came from, and how it was grown.
Edward Bocock, owner of New Day Blueberry Farm, implemented Paragon’s Food Traceability Solution to manage his crop and provide better service to his customers.
“Our farm is family owned, but the area we provide to has grown exponentially over the years. Our berries are shipped all over the world- New Jersey, California, even Japan. It all depends on the order,” Ed explains. With more than one million pounds of blueberries shipped globally per year, the Bococks rely on a regimented system to track their fruits from the day they were picked to their final delivery at the grocery store.
Using handheld scanners, employees capture the unique barcode on their I.D. badges and print a corresponding barcoded label. This label is applied to the berries they pick, keeping tabs on the field number, the date of harvest, the harvester, and their daily yield. Even after the produce leaves the farm, the Bococks can track their blueberries throughout the shipment process thanks to their specialized labels.
So why does Ed trust Paragon to keep his farm running?
