Why Traceability Matters
Traceability is a key part of quality.
Making safe, delicious food is a key step of our quality program, but it goes beyond that. Our quality team also does the big job of tracing where the ingredients we use start and where each case of product ends up. Each case, bag and cup of food that leaves our building has a lot code on it. This is an important part of how we trace our food. If an ingredient we used to make our soup, for example, was suddenly recalled, our team would be able to quickly track down and place cases on hold.
During our mock recall tests, our teams are able to track down and put a hold on all cases within hours of notification, thanks to our robust lot code and traceability standards. And practice! We learn something during every mock recall. Mock or not, our recall team includes individuals from all departments, an important factor to make sure we are covering all our bases. We are able to assemble this team at any time of the day, from anywhere and we even practice these exercises outside of normal business hours to verify our process. Annually, we conduct a mock recall with an imaginary scenario to test this program.
Our traceability starts before an ingredient makes it to our facilities and before we even begin to think about cooking it into delicious food. Traceability starts in the fields or manufacturing facilities of our ingredient suppliers. Our QA team works hard to track an ingredient from its origination point to storage, shipping, receiving, preparation and finally through to cooking. From there, those ingredients are still tracked, but now as a part of a whole, finished food.
Using our system, we are able to trace product to the exact rack number it is sitting on in our facilities. We don’t just know where in our building a case is sitting, we know what shelf it’s on.
It’s not only safe and necessary to have traceability systems in place, but it also helps our team quickly conduct quality checks or gather information if our customer, R&D or Supply Chain teams have questions. If a customer wants to know where the ingredients in their product comes from, traceability is key. If our Supply Chain team wants to shore up our raw materials and halt buying of a product from a particular region experiencing quality issues, traceability can help highlight and isolate potential supplier issues. If our marketing team is aiming to highlight all ingredients sourced from our home state of Colorado, our traceability efforts can help pull this information. If R&D sees an ingredient behaving differently in one product, they can use our ingredient traceability records to understand all of the items that ingredient goes into. Regardless of a pressing need, we conduct monthly traceability exercises on our finished products, raw materials and packaging materials, just to make sure we are staying sharp!
Traceability is an integral and mandatory part of the Global Food Safety Initiative to which we are certified annually. We prefer to work with ingredient suppliers who are also GFSI certified, as a part of our supplier approval program. This helps ensure smooth traceability of our raw materials.