Nestlé’s Smart HACCP Transformation
With more than 2,000 brands in 186 countries, Nestlé is part of the daily lives of billions of people worldwide. Delivering on our mission to provide consumers with the best-tasting, nutritious food and beverage choices requires an unwavering commitment to food safety.
Managing food safety at this scale requires rigor, consistency and agility. For decades, Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) have been the globally recognized preventative approach to food safety. However, legacy spreadsheet and paper-based HACCP processes are challenged by the ever-changing realities of modern food systems: complexity and disruptions in supply chains, faster innovation cycles, changing consumer needs, emerging hazards and routes of contamination, more sophisticated analytics, as well as corresponding adoption of stricter regulatory requirements.
To transform HACCP for the digital era, we partnered with Veeva Systems as an early adopter of its cloud-based QualityOne digital HACCP solution, built to modernize the cornerstone of food safety management systems (FSMS) for the food and beverage industry.
The Need for a Lean, Agile Approach to HACCP
We at Nestlé have digitalized many of the elements of our FSMS, including food safety early warning systems, predictive analytics for supplier management, environmental monitoring programs, CAPA and consumer feedback sentiment analysis. However, the engine room of our FSMS — our HACCP program across multiple business units — existed in spreadsheets, across multiple languages and formats. Nestlé manages nearly 3,000 HACCP plans across over 300 factories worldwide, each with numerous steps, including hazard identification, hazard assessment, control measures, monitoring and verification. While effective, the manual approach came with challenges:
- Global Oversight and Consistency: Different HACCP formats, terminology, languages and processes created variability across manufacturing sites and businesses.
- Inefficiency: Time-consuming processes for creating, reviewing and updating HACCP studies, with significant effort spent on manual data entry and comparison. The lack of a unified structured data source (master data) hindered inter-business transparency and limited the ability to leverage data for AI of the future.
- Agility and Reactivity: Static documentation processes, limited rapid responses to new hazards/risks, regulatory changes and product innovations.
Through our HACCP digital transformation, we wanted to fundamentally change how Nestlé manages its food safety system. We left behind a burdensome, static, paper-based system to adopt a lean, agile, intuitive and future-ready platform that supports global excellence and interconnectivity to other enterprise systems.
Partnering on a Digital HACCP Solution
As an early adopter of the QualityOne digital HACCP solution, we’re transforming HACCP from a complex, manual, compliance activity to a connected, dynamic and value-adding capability that is seamlessly integrated with other enterprise systems. Beyond the holistic strengthening and modernization of food safety management, other key benefits have included:
- Standardization and Efficiency at Scale
We eliminated data silos and created a single global standard by harmonizing 3,000 HACCP plans through aligned, structured master data libraries across several business units. Operations and R&D teams now collaborate seamlessly across more than 300 factories. We centrally manage updates based on new food safety hazards or risks, and every site follows a digitally-enabled process.
By using modular, digital building blocks of expert-curated hazard identification and risk assessment for raw materials, processing and packaging, we ensure aligned food safety risk management. Automating workflows and eliminating manual data entry has saved significant time and resources in HACCP study creation and review.
- Agility and Speed
HACCP system digitalization enabled integration with other upstream and downstream food safety and manufacturing enterprise systems, including SAP, quality monitoring platforms and food safety early warning platforms. Consequently, site-level HACCP studies can be updated in real time in response to new hazards/risks, regulatory changes or product innovations. Automatic notifications and integrated data flows enable rapid, coordinated action across the organization. We can now respond to food safety threats faster and more consistently, ensuring food safety keeps pace with a dynamic external environment.
Partnership for Sustained Transformation
Bringing HACCP to the digital era was not merely a Food Safety and Quality (FSQ) function project. Nestlé food safety and IT leaders collaborated closely with Veeva Systems’ technology experts to unlock value from unstructured, numerical, written and visual data stored in spreadsheets, to harmonize it into structured libraries, and validate every detail.
Working together, we ensured a fully transparent, multilingual solution that is compliant with regulatory and certification body requirements. Reports and hazard assessments are easily exported and shared for audit purposes. Today, the QualityOne digital HACCP solution is being deployed across Nestlé sites and underpins Nestlé’s food safety management system.
What’s Next
Digital HACCP is a major milestone towards smarter food safety, and contributes to our operations' digital transformation journey. Our vision is an end-to-end dynamic, digital food safety ecosystem that connects seamlessly between early warning systems, supply chain risk assessment and verification systems.
Together, we foresee a more predictive, transparent and resilient food safety ecosystem. Since we have reconciled and structured our food safety data in the digital HACCP platform, we are well placed to take advantage of various large language models and machine learning AI tools in the future in the food safety domain.
At Nestlé, food safety has always been non-negotiable. With Veeva’s solutions, it is now becoming smarter, faster, and more connected. This sets a new benchmark, not only for Nestlé, but for the entire food and beverage industry.
