Member Matters
Reduce the Risk of Costly Recalls: How Automating PIFs Improves Accuracy and Compliance
21 November 2024
Associate Member Feature | Centric Software
As the food and beverage sector strives to navigate the complex landscape of regulatory requirements, ensuring accurate product information and timely compliance utilising modern, digital tools has become paramount for maintaining brand integrity and safeguarding consumer health.
Food recalls impact brand image and profit
The Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) coordinated 791 food recalls between 2013-2022, with 87% consumer initiated and 13% trade initiated. Of those, almost 46% were due to incorrect labelling, including undeclared allergens. As well as posing a serious health and safety hazard to consumers, food recalls undermine marketing efforts to increase brand awareness and loyalty, when products are suddenly pulled from the shelves. In the current economic climate where consumer confidence is wavering, food and beverage businesses cannot afford to take such costly risks.
For ANZ food suppliers and their customers, product data management has been a slow moving phenomenon. For years, the industry has leaned on spreadsheet-based Product Information Form (PIF) to exchange crucial product data—ingredients, origins, nutritional information, allergens, certifications and more. While PIF is a step in the right direction, manually updating each PIF on spreadsheets is burdensome and puts a strain on resources.
In addition, the manual process makes it highly prone to errors, inevitably leading to compliance and certification risks. Bottlenecks in processes and legacy systems lacking integration negatively impact efficiency and productivity. In turn, sales revenue opportunities will take a hit due to hindered innovation, hurting company profitability.
Digitalising data and processes reduces risk
The integration of foundational product development platforms like Centric Product Lifecycle Management (Centric PLM) with the online PIF portal, Bizcaps PIF Manager transforms the management of product information for the food industry. This combination facilitates the automatic creation, maintenance, and exchange of PIFs, eradicating manual entries and reducing errors. Such seamless automation not only drives efficiency and streamlines compliance, but also frees up resources to focus on innovation and adding value.
Graham Jones, ANZ Sales Director at Centric Software says, “Our customer sought a seamless process from raw materials to finished goods, desiring a single user interface and one source of truth, eliminating manual data entry. Centric’s integration with Bizcaps ensures PIFs are seamlessly received in the Centric system, and when approved, updates to recipes, nutrients and allergens are made without re-keying. For finished goods, sending PIFs to customers happens directly from the Centric UI, guaranteeing accuracy from one source of truth. With Bizcaps and Centric, manual PIF handling is obsolete.”
Discover case studies of how F&B brands, retailers and producers such as Bundaberg Sugar, Forbidden Foods, SNS and Great Kitchens are streamlining compliance and product development in Centric’s eBook developed in collaboration with Bizcaps Software: Minimize Risk, Maximize Innovation with PIF Manager and PLM.
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