IFT First 2024: FoodChain ID’s digital solutions navigate product development
29 Jul 2024 | FoodChain ID
In an era of information overload, digitization is becoming a license to do business, suggests Wes Frierson, vice president of life cycle solutions at FoodChain ID. He explains how automation can help companies run more efficiently and rapidly develop products that are compliant in diverse markets. He also shares how shifting regulations and unstable supply chains are forcing businesses to react faster.
This is Misty Green with Food Ingredients first.
I'm here with Wes Frierson, who's the vice president of product life cycle solutions at Food Chain ID.
Welcome, Wes.
Thank you.
So Food Chain ID does a lot of consultancy and.
Advisory for food and beverage companies.
What are some of the biggest challenges that you find in these companies?
Yes, we do do a lot of advisory and consulting and helping you evaluate what people's kind of compliance innovation processes look like, and I'd say.
I see a few things pretty much across the board.
Like one is just the external environment is getting much more complex.
Even in the last five years, what they're challenged with is way different than what they were dealing with, and that's overwhelming teams in one way.
Second is just the volume of activity and data they're dealing with.
Again, think about sustainability, new claims, new functional ingredients.
It's just a lot more volume and a lot of the activities are still very manual, right?
So a lot more to do manual ways of doing it.
And third, maybe as important as anything else is they just don't have a great way to leverage information to make better decisions and innovate and sometimes that's because they're overwhelmed by just way too much information.
They can't separate the signal from the noise and sometimes they may have great information from partners or internally, they just don't know how to get to the right people at the right time to actually get effect from that.
From that information, right, so what are some of the ways that food chain ID is helping companies tackle these problems?
So we, we, we, we're doing a lot and you know, throughout the company, but I would say one of the big things that we continue to focus on is, putting a lot of innovation into our digital products that are meant to support innovation and compliance because ultimately all the things I mentioned that we see with our customers is it's just too much to overcome.
Come just by hiring or trying to optimize manual processes you've got to have digital leverage so we're spending a lot of time doing that in our products like our food chain recipe and specifications and compliance analysis we have formulation for Workbench which plugs directly into PLM environments that our customers may be using that's where we're seeing that really you know drive this forward that's where we're investing quite a bit.
So for example we talked before about, you know, not being able to get.
Information the right people at the right time just too much information we've embedded you know kind of smart advisor technology in our formulation tools so a good way to think about that is you think about that when you're you know driving somewhere if you're using say a paper map back in the old days right?
You'd have a map it may be a little bit dated so it had information you could definitely get to where you're going but it might be a bit dated you had to find where you were going find where you were find where you wanted to go trace your route all the way around.
You know if there was a wreck, if there was weather, that was things you had to figure out and adjust to on your own.
Think about today using something like Waze or Google Maps, right, so it knows where you're at, it knows where you're going, it knows what kind of car you're driving, it understands weather conditions, it understands traffic jam up ahead, it understands where gas stations are so in that way it's helping guide you towards that objective like you're not, you know, when when Waze tells you to exit, you just exit because you know it knows, you know, best how to get to that objective.
We're trying to put that intelligence.
That intelligence into our tools that help guide developers so same thing they're trying to develop something they've got certain product standards they're trying to hit claims they're trying to hit they have cost constraints you know they've got markets they're trying to sell it into.
They have to hit regulatory targets there that is very difficult.
That's a lot of stuff to do all at once.
So what we're able to do is actually guide them along the way.
We know what markets they're selling into.
We know what their objectives are and we're steering them.
The visible hand is helping kind of get them to their objective.
That's great because what that means is instead of overwhelming people with information we only get that information when it's important we understand this type of product you're making and its objectives and therefore we're giving you either a risk or an opportunity to optimize really are rely on the process and that's that's a huge advantage a really big thing that we see over and over is just being able to promote continuous learning right and continuous improvement.
So if you make a mistake that's cost you a lot of time and money.
It just those tend to sometimes happen over and over, right?
You can create checklists.
You can try to send out memos and warn people in team meetings, but there's just a lot.
So what we can do is take those learnings and we can actually embed them into the smart assistant and even if that doesn't happen again for 2 or 3 years, the next time that set of conditions presents itself, the smart assistant's gonna pop up and let you know, hey, this is potentially a problem and veer you away from it.
So that's really a huge, that is a huge opportunity for a lot of our customers.
So that's, that's one good example.
In terms of how we can actually use that data, probably a second example that we see quite a bit is managing the overwhelming amount of data you're very dependent on people like supply chain partners or sharing things internally.
It's really hard to move that information around to get in the first place.
So if you're going to be doing an evaluation or compliance, you don't that you have to have the information to start with a lot of it's coming from supply chain or going to people there and a lot of times, you know, tools start with assuming you have all the information.
In most of our tools, so in our recipe and specifications tool and our packaging compliance tools and others, we build out the supplier collaboration part digitally as just part of our overall workflow.
So when you're, you know, working in that tool, we know that you have to solicit this information, you have to acquire it, you have to validate it.
It needs to be in a leverageable state that can actually do something with.
So that's a huge part of what we do in our tools is build that supplier collaboration and build that digital traceability all the way through, and that is that is kind of a game changer for a lot of companies.
Because you're getting a lot of things at once you're getting a lot of efficiency.
People aren't spending time just chasing suppliers and information around.
You're getting a lot more accuracy.
You're getting traceability.
You know exactly where you got the information, where it's going, and how it ended up on the product.
And then finally it's in a leverageable state.
You're not getting a bunch of PDFs and Word docs you can't do anything with.
You're getting structured information that we can actually leverage for optimization using things like AI.
It's providing a ton of value, so we're building that directly.
The products as.
I think last thing is just a lot of automation, right?
Being able to automatically assess compliance from the first moment of development we've got that embedded in the tools.
So if you want to evaluate, say a product or even 10 products against 20 different markets, that's something you can do in minutes using our software and again an R&D developer can do that as a desk check really early in the process while they're actually still making gradient decisions versus waiting weeks to get farther down the line.
Tossing it over to the regulatory team, getting answers back in a very slow and churny way, we're able to really smooth that process out and get a much better flow of information, so a lot of things like automated label generation, claims validation, validating things like standard of identity, by adding that kind of automation to the product, we're putting a lot of extra time to go do meaningful things instead of making kind of very valuable resources spend a lot of time doing chores.
