Food For Thought: Improving Food Manufacturer & Retailer Teamwork In A Recall (Part Three Of Three)

What are the latest food and safety technologies in the realm of information sharing systems and how are they being applied in recall situations? Alicia, if you want to start off and then we can get Kim's thoughts afterwards.

Alicia: GMA is a great source for recall information, as well as the reportable food registry. Now once again, how we're actually leveraging that, that's a little bit out of my scope. Those are two source points if you just want to understand what's happening and what's going on when it comes to just the industry in regards to recall. That's my scope of it. My support of recall is more or less on definitely how do we pull the products back and how do we get in front of the customer to identify every case.

For us, on our end, one of the technologies we have, we have a system called Tableau. Tableau will help us in any and everything that we need to report, we're able to capture that, as well as, this may see a simple thing, but it's still a good source.

Excel is also a very good source. We're very proactive in having a sales database that if anything was to kick off in regards to a recall, we already know, like we're able to pull in who's the customer, who's the proper contact, who's even the customer service reps that supports the particular customer, that if any activity happens, it's a matter of utilizing sales, doing a quick look up and we're done, and we're able to go towards our customer. That's more of a traditional Excel. People are like okay, but it's also still a very helpful tool. That Excel is also very helpful in identifying and tracking our ability to reach out to our customers, how we're able to reach out to the customers, give a response back, were they able to report cases, everything possible, and also that is something that we're trying to go down and report back to the FDA that we're able to leverage that document to report back to the FDA on how we perform in a recall.

Sam: What about you, Kim? Are there any communication technologies or food safety technologies that are helping you?

Kim: We're using an internal program that communicates directly to our source, so I have visibility to see what our source have pulled off the shelves. Before issuing a notice, the piece of the puzzle that I'm specifically looking for is whether or not a specific division or store is scanning a particular UPC.

 Again, we're not as focused on the specific code date until that's what the store will look for. We're just looking at does a division or does a store even carry the items. Since a lot of things may be regional, we don't need to communicate to the whole company on every single recall. We do try and make it specific to a specific division. We're using our programs to be able to do that. Our scanning data that we have is coming into us each day. We utilize that data to help us create recalls that are specific down to a division or store level without over communicating to the company.