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The food industry is facing increasing pressure to improve safety of food from two fronts, the consumer, and regulator. Consumers are becoming more sophisticated and demanding more from food suppliers while agencies ranging from FAO and WHO to national food safety agencies and health authorities are enforcing more stringent safety requirements.
Consumers in developed and developing economies are demanding an increasing range of foods to be sourced from all parts of the world and seasonal foods to be on the shelves all year round.
Coupled with this there is a greater awareness of nutrition, environment, sustainability and ethics of food production, putting greater demand on the suppliers and retailers.
The easy availability of information globally means the consumer can find scientifically correct information about products and ingredients, news and even misinformation anywhere, anytime. This means food safety issues can be reported around the world in an instant and affect suppliers, processors, and retailers in an instant.
On the regulatory side, there is pressure, both internationally and nationally, to improve the safety of global food supplies at all points along the increasingly complex supply chains.
These can involve multiple growers, processors, transporters, ingredient and packaging manufacturers and storage sites in any part of the world. Even simple ingredients can have complex supply chains with multiple handover points where risk can be introduced and then errors become difficult to trace.
After several major food safety scares, such as melamine in baby milk formula, horsemeat in beef products, numerous outbreaks of food-borne diseases caused by Salmonella, E. coli, and Listeria, authorities have tightened requirements for all components of food supply chains.
Most significantly, major food importing and exporting countries such as the US and China have introduced the greatest changes to their food safety legislation for decades.
Legislation requires all businesses along the supply chain to take responsibility for ensuring the supplies and suppliers they use, as well as their own products, are safe and conform to standards.
Processors, manufacturers, packers, suppliers and distributors of food ingredients and products must be able to:
Data on causes of failure to comply with food safety standards compiled by BRC auditors shows that the most common cause of failure is basic hygiene, which includes: sanitation, cleaning, personal hygiene and pest management programmes. [1]
New technology developed by Rentokil Initial uses a range of sensors and wireless technology to send sensor data automatically to a cloud storage system.
The data is combined with an integrated online reporting and analysis system that allows customers to monitor and analyse data collected from their sites.
The same data when collated across all sites and combined with data collected by technicians gives Rentokil unprecedented insights into food safety across thousands of sites.
PestConnect is a collection of devices that detect or capture a variety of pests using traps, bait stations, and monitoring units.
The devices have integrated sensors that can detect a pest, activate a trap, and automatically trigger an alert to Rentokil, for a technician to schedule a priority visit, through a dedicated wireless network or GSM mobile network.
The technician will visit the site, survey for signs of pests and recommend measures to improve the integrated pest management service.
These systems are integrated with the myRentokil customer portal, where the data is available immediately to the customer and it provides trend reporting, recommendations, interactive maps, charts and analytical tools to support internal and external audits. PestConnect is already installed at over 1,000 locations and will be available in Malaysia in a very near future.
Data collected through PestConnect solution consists of pest incident observations and recommendations that are collected from 51,000 sites in 27 countries. This data is entered by our technicians into myRentokil, a powerful online reporting tool to analyse safety factors throughout the supply chain every time a site visit is conducted.
Our PestConnect solution discreetly monitors pest incidences and hygiene compliance to give management an instant indication on:
Recorded pest incidents worldwide show that just over half of pest problems are caused by rodents and a quarter by flying insects. Interestingly, when the detailed recommendations made by Rentokil technicians across all the sites are analysed, they show that the major factor that needs improvement is sanitation and hygiene.
The data that has been collected by our Connect solutions gives a strong indication that when businesses follow basic procedures for cleaning, preventing contamination and ensuring hygiene, it can have a major effect on improving and maintaining safety throughout the supply chain.
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