Food Distributors
Your customers expect transparency and traceability. Distributors can deliver – with FoodLogiQ Connect
Distributors make our food supply chain function
An indispensable platform
Foodservice distributors are an absolutely vital link in the overall food supply chain, delivering food and ingredients to professional kitchens, consumer packaged goods manufacturers, food processors and more.
As the middleman between food manufacturers and foodservice operators, a food distributor plays a vital role in both food safety and food traceability. In the United States, the food distribution chain includes more than 15,000 companies – all operating thousands of warehouses and large fleets of trucks.
Add it all up, and you’re looking at more than 25 million cases of product every day. With an operation as vast and complex as this, it’s no surprise that safety, traceability and product tracking are essential to success.
With FoodLogiQ Connect you can:
- Build strong relationships with your suppliers – in a single supplier management platform
- Create a customized supplier dashboard specific to you, with drag-and-drop functionality highlighting the data you need for your business
- Reduce complexity with automated workflows and assessments, saving time and reducing overhead costs
Getting ahead of government regulation
Federal oversight is growing rapidly
The food distributor industry is overseen by three federal agencies:
- U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Each of these agencies oversees different areas of our food distribution network. Meat, poultry and egg products are handled by the USDA, the safety of production, processing, packaging and storing of domestic and imported food is handled by the FDA, and the CDC coordinates with both agencies around disease and outbreak response.
On January 4th, 2011, President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) into law, shifting the focus of FDA regulators from responding to contamination to preventing it. A decade since the law was ratified, the burden now falls fully on the distributor to create a proactive approach to food safety and traceability. And make no mistake, that is a heavy burden.
With FoodLogiQ Connect you can:
- Ease compliance with automatic backup of required records, automated workflows and foreign supplier verification
- Keep critical food safety documentation online, with real-time updates pushed to your entire company in one click
- Get the transparency necessary to implement corrective actions before the FDA needs an investigation – switch from responding to preparing
Contamination, spoilage and fresh product concerns
Reduce contamination & spoilage
For facilities and trucks, it’s imperative to have programs to prevent environmental contamination and insect or vermin infestation. When working with numerous suppliers, quality and audit management is a key part of preventing contaminated and spoiled product being delivered to customers.
Products close to their expiration date or damaged while at the facility should be logged, separated from other fresh products for further inspection and returned to the supplier or dumped, if necessary.
With FoodLogiQ Connect you can:
- Capture food quality incidents in real-time, and report those issues directly through the supplier in a single interface
- Fully customize documentation and audits directly in the platform
- Control withdrawals and compliance plans for your suppliers
- Identify where problem suppliers are costing you business through our supply chain visualization dashboards
Modernize your distribution chain with FoodLogiQ Connect
Deliver the traceability and quality data that your customers crave.