Nestlé Takes a Proactive Approach to Food Safety With Digital HACCP and Cloud Automation
Nestlé is bolstering its food quality assurance processes by using cloud-based technology that streamlines operations and increases visibility.
The company has been on a journey to advance food safety, and so it is building on a partnership with Veeva to move away from manual, siloed processes bogged down by spreadsheets. Becoming an early adopter of hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP) technology, the company looks to benefit from proactive decision-making rather than leaning on reactionary operations.
HACCP is a management system through which food safety is addressed by analyzing and controlling biological, chemical, and physical hazards across the product lifecycle — from raw material production, procurement and handling, to manufacturing, distribution and consumption of the finished product.
Through the technology, Nestlé can standardize, automate, and simplify food safety studies, reducing risk and introducing local flexibility across its enterprise using automatic change notifications and task reminders for improved efficiency. As a result, the company hopes to increase visibility across the HACCP management, consolidate data analytics tools, eliminate or reduce incorrect data entry, integrate several data flows across applications, and simplify flow diagrams.
More About Digital HACCP
Olivier Mignot, global head of quality management at Nestlé, previously said digital HACCP tools can help the company quickly adjust or make changes within its food systems to prevent issues. As the company workshopped the tool, it was able to correct and adjust the model to address discrepancies — one of the first learnings before deploying on a broader scale.
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In the end, quality ties everything together because it makes the product what it is and what consumers like, he tells CGT.
“Digital HACCP is at the core of food safety management, helping us identify hazards and design plans or checks to address them,” Mignot adds. “We are evolving our quality systems to be predictive, connected, and embedded. Then it is an end-to-end approach to food safety and quality.”
John Donaghy, global head of food safety at Nestlé, said the new digital solution gives the company the agility to create, manage, and streamline its HACCP studies more efficiently, so it can respond faster to changes and prevent safety issues before they escalate.
The company has started a limited roll-out across several locations.
