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What We’re Reading: The Importance of Traceability in Dairy

By Grace Barton Updated

Can you trace all your dairy ingredients back to their origins? Making the leap to selling products to the largest clients – like the Walmarts and Costcos of the world – requires meeting rigorous traceability standards. Lately, we’ve been having a lot of conversations about traceability with dairy customers looking to scale up their distribution, and we thought this DairyFoods.com piece from last summer might be worth resurfacing.

Read “Traceability not an easy feat for dairy processors” on DairyFoods.com.

The article highlights consumers’ increasing attention to the ability of dairy processors to trace ingredients in products like milk, cheese, ice cream, yogurt and cottage cheese back to their sources:

  • A Nielsen report, “What’s In Our Food and On Our Mind.” found that customers report product safety claims influence their purchasing choices when it comes to consuming milk, yogurt and cheese.
  • A “Top Trends 2023 Dairy & Dairy Alternatives” report found that product safety was the No. 1 influencer for consumers from 35 countries when purchasing drinkable yogurt and milk products.

As you know well, believing in the value of traceability is one thing. Being able to meet strict standards is quite another. In the article, the technical director of the Global Food Traceabilty Center at the Institute of Food Technologies articulates the challenges:

“Linking products from one Critical Tracking Event (i.e., harvesting, transformation, shipping, receiving, etc.) to another presents significant complexities, despite its seemingly straightforward concept. For instance, in the case of dairy, aggregation occurs at multiple stages; initially, milk products are collected from numerous farms by a tanker, and subsequently, the tanker transports the milk to the manufacturing facility, where it is combined with other deliveries.”

The complexities pose challenges – but the challenges are not insurmountable.

ParityFactory WMS & MES was designed to address exactly these types of traceability challenges. We’re experienced and skilled with dairy operations, and we’re well positioned to help you automate your tracing in a way that keeps you in compliance and expands your universe of potential customers.

We’ve helped numerous mid-size operations scale up by moving away from paper-and-pencil tracing and into streamlined operations that elevate safety and make mock recalls easier.

One of our newest features enables customers to simplify production runs by tracing both bulk and non-bulk items as a single product.

Ready to simplify your workflows and increase efficiencies? Let’s talk.

Originally post November 27, 2023.

Grace Barton

Marketing Specialist

About the Author Latest Posts

Grace Barton is a digital marketing and competitive intelligence professional who crafts strategic narratives by bridging marketing insights with analytical expertise. At Advantive, she creates engaging, data-driven content tailored to the distribution, manufacturing, packaging, and quality industries. Her goal is to deliver impactful messaging that drives engagement and growth based on specific gap closure needs, whether responding to sales organization requirements, pinpointing gaps in content, or meeting immediate market trends.
She thrives on transforming competitive intelligence into actionable insights for the sales organization. Grace manages Advantive’s competitive intelligence platform, Klue, to equip the sales team with the battlecards and market data they need to stay ahead of competitors. Since launch, she’s built 28+ battlecards across four lines of business, ensuring the GTM strategy stays sharp.
Grace has a passion for leveraging market insights with storytelling to guide strategic decision-making, empower sales organizations, and nurture organizational growth.

Areas of Expertise: Digital Marketing, Competitive Intelligence, Strategic Narratives, Marketing Insights, Analytical Expertise

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