5 Key Steps You’ll Be Glad You Took When a Food Recall Hits

Listeria. Salmonella. Lead. These are things you really don’t want in your kielbasa or your peanut butter, but with food recalls reaching a five year high last year distributors need to start thinking of these things as facts of life. The question isn’t if, but when—which means food and beverage distributors across the country really need to take a look at their organizations and ask how quickly and easily they’ll be able to enact their recall plan when the need arises. 

Here, success is rarely about heroics in the moment—rather, it’s about how well you prepare. As a food distributor, these are a few of the things you’ll be glad you did to prepare yourself for potential food recall chaos down the line. 

Implementing GS1 Standards Across Your Technology Stack

GS1 traceability standards are common in the industry for a reason: they provide clear best practices for making sure you know where any given product is at any given time. These standards help distributors keep a clear record of:

• GTIN
• Product lot information
• Production date information
• And more

When a manufacturer calls with the news that a product needs to be recalled, this type of information is critical to have on hand, and you’ll be glad you’ve already implemented these standards when the need for traceability rears its head. 

Crucially, this level of traceability needs to exist up and down the supply chain. If your ERP enables you to support GS1 standards but your driver mobile app doesn’t, you’re going to run into issues. 

<< Learn how DispatchTrack helped Merit Foods to streamline their food distribution process: read the case study! >>

2. Breaking Down Data Silos Throughout Your Supply Chain

Having data is one thing—but accessing it quickly when the pressure is on is something else entirely. Like we noted above, having technology solutions that work together to produce a single source of truth is an important part of the equation, but focusing on other potential sources of data silos can be valuable as well. 

Look at your current recall plan and note who the team members are that are playing important roles. Then ask yourself a few questions:

• What information can the team members in each of these roles access with ease on a regular basis?
• What data would each team member need to call a coworker to request?
• How up-to-date is the data that each member of your team can easily find?
• What happens if a given team member needs information that’s outside their daily remit (e.g. if a warehouse manager needed to know what happened on a given delivery run)?
• How are data handovers handled from one teammate to another?

The answers to these questions can tell you a lot about how easy or difficult it is to get the information you need right when you need it. When manufacturers have recalls, they’re aiming to get all of their tracing done within two hours—is there any operational data that it would take that long to track down? 

3. Focusing on Customer Connectivity and Communication

Now, a lot of the work of mitigating recall chaos is going to happen within your own four walls. If you’re lucky, a lot of the impacted product will still be in your warehouse and you can be safely disposed of or destroyed. Realistically, however, you’re going to have to get in touch with your customers to track down product that has already been delivered. 

When that time comes, you want your communication channels to be wide open. Customers should be used to hearing from you and should feel comfortable reaching back out to you. The absolute last thing you want is to be in a position where you’re struggling to track down the right point of contact at a grocery store because the particular sales rep on their account happens to be on vacation that day. 

Simply put, the right emails and phone numbers for your contacts should be in your last mile system, and you should have direct two-way communication capabilities for chatting with your points of contact. Most of the time, these capabilities will be for things like delivery schedule reminders and day-of notifications, but having these tools in your back pocket for sending out bulk messages about potential recall impacts can be a huge time saver. 

4. Capturing Digital Proof of Delivery

If your last mile delivery solution provides you with GS1 tracing capabilities and strong last mile delivery visibility, then you’ll be able to visualize what was delivered to a given location with relative ease.

But sometimes that’s not quite enough. Your client might say that the order wasn’t actually delivered, or that they can’t find it, or that they don’t know which door you left it at, etc. When this happens, you want to have a deeper level of information that you can call up to see exactly what happened on the day of delivery. This is where proof of delivery comes in. 

It’s one thing to say, “someone on your team signed for this so we know it was delivered at 7:30 am on Tuesday.” It’s another thing entirely to be able to point to a timestamped photo that shows exactly what was delivered, what condition it was in, and where it was left.

When you can grab this data quickly—as in with just a few clicks—you can get on the same page with customers more quickly as well. In a high stakes situation like a recall, a picture can be worth much more than a thousand words. Making those pictures mandatory for each and every delivery can strengthen your posture against a whole host of potential disruptions. 

5. Streamlining Your Technology Stack

We discussed data silos above, and we’ve talked about data visibility throughout, but the last point we really want to hammer home is the value of having the right data in the right place at the right time. That can be incredibly hard to do when your technology stack isn’t streamlined. 

The last thing you want when you’re trying to manage something as time sensitive as food recall is to be stuck wondering just which solution has the data you want in it. For deliveries, you may be stuck wondering whether a particular delivery time stamp or barcode scan is in your routing software, or your telematics, or your ERP, or your customer engagement platform. All the while, the seconds are ticking by.

This doesn’t happen when your tech stack is built to last. It’s not just enough to have best-in-class solutions—you need the right solutions and they need to interact in the right way. Data needs to be shared seamlessly between different solutions so different roles within your company can work quickly and efficiently. Simply put, you want everyone in the organization singing off the same sheet of music. 

This can be a big lift. It requires teams from across your operations to work together on choosing and implementing the right solutions. But the payoff can be huge. For one thing, it can help you reduce costs on redundant IT spend and potentially streamline your operations in a way that reduces overall logistics costs. At the same time, it will put you in a position to move much more quickly and easily in the case of a food recall. If you prepare yourself beforehand by adopting the right technology and best practices, we can guarantee you’ll be glad you did. 

To learn more about our food distribution capabilities, check our food distribution solution here: https://www.dispatchtrack.com/industries/food-beverage