Real-time Food Safety System certification 

The new competitor of Food multinationals: 

Real-time Food Safety System certification: 25 years ago I worked for a multinational company for a few years and what struck me was that everything revolved around the brand. Major investments in Marketing campaigns and your career path was very clear: Marketing and Finance (good in Excel) and go, and yes, some colleagues like me also did Supply Chain management.

Because the policy was not to produce for third parties, there was no pressure to be certified for FSSC 22000 (then Dutch HACCP), BRCGS and IFS – International Featured Standards which was the challenge for those Private Label factories. The brand, in which often half a century of marketing was invested, has already given a winning sense of trust among consumers, the products must be food safe and good.

Hallmarks

Because larger companies can have more impact on the Global Supply Chain, the labels, Chains of Custody, such as Rainforest Alliance and Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) were invented. The purpose of these quality marks was to further confirm this feeling of safety and gave a nice unique selling point to the multinationals, private label producers and family businesses were usually only able to enter these Chains of Custody a few years later and when a proposition had become mainstream, a new quality mark was added, such as Planet Proof..

All these hallmarks and “reasons to believe” are largely based on a little tracing and a lot of marketing and are no longer distinguishable due to the sprawl.

Digitalisation

Digitization, real-time consumer information and increasingly complex regulations and consumer expectations will ensure that the Supply Chain functions will become more important than Marketing in the coming years, which can have a major impact on multinationals, whose valuations are largely based on “brands”.

Real-time food safety systems

It also presents a great opportunity for the multinational that focuses on substantiating the brand experience with real-time compliance information towards customer expectations.The brand then becomes the “new” certificate for real-time food safey systems.

Real-time trust and transparency

Today’s Food multinationals like Unilever, Nestlé, The Coca-Cola Company and Danone must transform from marketing to real-time compliance companies, which operations offer trust and transparency.

Transforming marketing into real-time compliance business

This requires a different focus on capability building: the transformation of marketing into a real-time compliance company. If this is not part of the strategy, eventually current food safety schemes will provide this confidence with real-time food safety system certification and thus give private label producers a unique selling point that will win over the current brand experience.

This trend could halve the valuation of multinationals…