How can you integrate quality assurance into every stage of food production?

How you can integrate quality assurance into every stage of Food production Step 1: Source the right quality raw materials Step 2: Have a data base for all approved supplier (Vendor) and carry out frequent quality audit. Step 3: Document product and recipe creation and all R&D product improvement Step 4: Catalog all production Standard Operation Procedures and ensure it is implemented. Step 4: Record all stages of processing in real-time. Step 5: Optimize and digitized quality assurance and inspection processes for smooth flow. Step 6: Monitor compliance on SOP of Food product storage. Step 7: Ensure to have free flow communication and feed back from consumers, document and make corrective actions where necessary.

Traceability of raw materials is set for big change, soon. Labeling of a raw material lot, localized to a farmer and specific field with a blockchain-enabled token (NFT) which contains within it all of this information, viewable with QR code, is going to revolutionize our ability to track productions backward. This future also lends forward the opportunity for raw material lot sale and ownership via the NFT associated with the production unit. The ability for everyone to see and search on public databases (blockchain) is going to be incredibly powerful. It will help us identify and proliferate best-practices and will also allow us to remove HUGE amounts of friction in regulatory oversight for raw material differentiation (organic, etc).

As the world increasingly converges on SAP and other modern ERP systems, the path is being paved for a handover to AI-system in compliance documentation management. This handover will then pave the way for blockchain enabled tracking from farm to fork. The end point is just too good for all parties to not be pursued full bore, once the human resources currently managing compliance are freed up to look more circumspectly at the processes in place. The end state here is a world where at each step of the process, an NFT (non-fungible tokens) is produced which itself owns several nested NFTs inside of it that contain all the information and ownership rights to the preceding components (raw material, processing qualifications, etc).

Today's compliance landscape is an enormous burden for all food companies. It is obviously bloated and inefficient, but the momentum behind it requires a great deal of effort to overcome. Ultimately, the FDA and EFSA have defined a food regulatory environment that is extremely heavy on CYA (cover your a$s) documentation. The result is anti-competitive with respect to allowing new companies and new products to disrupt the existing landscape because the regulatory burden is too great. As the world increasingly converges on SAP and other similar modern ERP systems, a great handover to AI-based CYA documentation management becomes easier, and eventually inevitable. Reform to the FDA and EFSA will come after (hopefully).

Start with your QA strategy and determine how you will define and measure quality. Set standards, targets and methods. Design the parameters in at prototype stage. Measure product at each development stage to update and define your standards and targets. On final gate before launch production, have all parties (ops, quality and RD) agree on final specifications and methods. Track results over time, and regularly review whether specifications and targets need to be updated. It is a dynamic process, monitored and controlled over time.