How to ensure product quality and safety throughout the distribution process?
As a food and beverage distributor, you are responsible for ensuring that the products you distribute are safe and of high quality. This can be challenging with products that must travel long distances and pass through many hands before reaching the customer.
You must have strict quality control procedures in place to catch any problems early on. In addition, you need to educate your employees and partners about food safety standard and practices.
Here are four essential safety practices that food distributors must always follow to ensure the quality and safety of theirs products:
Store food properly
Food logistics may seem easy, but the process involves many complications. Certain products must be stored under specific storage conditions, e.g., temperature-related, hazard-related, batchrelated, value-related, etc. To prevent food spoilage, storing food at the proper temperature is essential. This means using the correct type of packaging and ensuring that refrigerated or frozen goods are kept at an adequate temperature during warehousing and transport.
Follow strict guidelines for packaging and labeling
To help ensure the quality of your products, you must follow strict guidelines for packaging and labelling. All food products must be appropriately labelled with accurate information about their contents. Packaging should be designed to protect the food and keep it fresh.
Keep track of your products
As a food distributor, traceability is essential to ensuring the quality and safety of your products. Traceability refers to tracking a product from its origins to its final destination. This process helps to identify any problems that may occur during the distribution process and allows for corrective action to be taken quickly.
A warehouse management system provides a traceability report containing information about every product's progress during the inbound, internal, and outbound logistics processes. It registers Best-Before-Dates (where appropriate) and details of people that have executed the actions, thus offering a complete audit trail: who did what, when, and why. Avoid costly recalls of food products with a proper traceability system.
Most WMS systems will also ensure product traceability through GS1-based identification standards, which is the most important for identifying, capturing and sharing data about products, locations, assets, and more.
Inspect products before distribution
Before distributing any food product, you should inspect it to ensure it meets your quality standards. This includes checking the packaging for damage and inspecting the food for freshness. A quality control system is critical to a company's success because it guarantees that customers receive products that meet the required standards.
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