The Importance of Reliable Suppliers

Substandard suppliers pose a significant risk to food processors.  Having reliable, high-quality/food safety driven suppliers is critical to a food company’s product consistency and success.  It also assures compliance with Regulatory/GFSI standards and can prevent recalls due to undeclared sub-components and allergens or other food safety issues.

Key elements:

• Quality: ingredients can have an impact on the flavor, texture, color and nutritional value of the finished product so consistency in this area can help ensure that quality expectations are achieved.

• Supply Chain Reliability: reliable suppliers provide consistent delivery of ingredients that translates to expensive downtime costs or last-minute schedule changes.

• Innovation: robust suppliers can innovate new ingredients as a complement to an R&D department’s offerings to their customers.  They also provide options for companies regarding new flavors and coating trends to enable them to reach new customers with innovative products.

• Food Safety: ingredient suppliers have strong foreign material/microbiological systems that reduce risk to their customers.  They also provide sealed/secured transport of ingredients that allow their customers to verify security of their components through the supply chain process.  Temperature controls by suppliers of sensitive ingredients are also critical for the quality (spoilage avoidance) and food safety (microbiological) aspects of ingredients they provide.

• Traceability: a key element of a robust supplier is that they can adequately and effectively trace their components through their process and onto their customers to allow rapid traceability should a recall occur.  Unfortunately, many finished product recalls occur for undeclared allergens from suppliers (typically from their suppliers) which means efficacy in this area is critical.

In conclusion, innovative suppliers that have high quality with robust food safety/traceability systems and on-time delivery can help companies avoid downtime or expensive recalls from issues due to substandard process/ingredients.  Reputable suppliers eliminate a significant risk to food companies and can help them remain current with new offerings of products to their customers, making them relevant in the constantly changing marketplace.