Is your business ready to comply with tougher allergen labelling laws?

Environment secretary, Michael Gove has unveiled proposals to toughen allergen labelling laws, with Defra backing the calls by saying the UK’s two million allergy sufferers would have ‘greater confidence in their food.’

Whilst allergens and labelling are heavily in the spotlight, it’s still not beyond the realms of possibility to get it wrong. Recently, Sainsbury’s urgently had to recall their own-label, free-from garlic pizza bread which had undeclared cheese and milk which posed a large risk to any member of the public with a milk intolerance.

Sainsbury’s refused to reveal the product’s supplier to help save face, but nobody should ever feel susceptible to making this error as it could destroy your customer relationship and credibility.

Avoid sheer panic with farm-to-fork traceability

Sure, in the case of the garlic pizza bread you can point to the error in the labelling on the packaging, but the issue may have stemmed from an inability to fully trace all the ingredients in the product. What’s the point of having beautiful packaging if you can’t guarantee you’re printing accurate information?

To make matters worse, if you fall foul to a packaging disaster, you’ll be held accountable for tracing the root cause of the problem and this includes being able to track every single ingredient you’ve used in the product. Mismanagement of traceability in disparate spreadsheets will breed inaccuracies and destroy your confidence in the reliability of your results when the spotlight is truly on.

Not only will the panic create embarrassment, but failure to trace your product in response to a customer audit or product recall has the potential to place your entire business at risk. Your major customers will see the news and get cold feet and you could lose your British Retail Consortium (BRC) accreditation. 

Dynamics Food provides reliable and accurate inventory management that will help you track all the ingredients in your products. With end-to-end integration and capabilities in finance, manufacturing and distribution, Dynamics Food is the ideal food ERP software solution that will provide you with a full audit trail and farm-to-fork traceability so you can quickly and easily manage any product recalls if necessary.

Don’t gamble the future of your business with inaccurate information

Any bustling Food business can trace the foundations of their success to two key areas, they will have accurate business information and inventory management. It’s essential that you re-evaluate your operations if you feel that either of these areas can ‘sometimes be inaccurate’ in your business. If disaster strikes, you’ll be cursing the day you thought you could ‘get away with it’ and fantasising about having a business system that would have filled your team with confidence.

Dynamics Food will give you the knowledge to create an accurate report with the details and layout you want on your food label to safely display all potential allergens. If you need to print the allergen information yourself, our solution is also a fantastic platform for you to manage and centralise your design brief as you guide your team through new product development.

Interested in learning more? Register your place at our upcoming Dynamics Food webinar from 10:00am - 11:00am on Wednesday 6th March.