SCOTTISH COMPANY TRACEALL HELPS RAISE FOOD STANDARDS

Online system provides supply chain traceability

Scottish software company TraceAll has teamed up with English food process control business Qmach to provide an online system for tracing food ingredients and products throughout the global supply and production chain.

TraceAll, based at Hillington Park Innovation Centre, provides software designed to trace products from "end to end". The web-based online technology allows customers to instantly access full product information from anywhere in the world in real time, which is critical for fast and effective product recalls. The company and its new partner, Qmach, are offering food companies an automated way to comply with new food safety requirements on traceability.

New rules mean companies must be able to trace ingredients from source and products "to the till", allowing them to pinpoint problems when a food safety incident occurs, and make recalls if necessary. Retail giants are currently rolling out mandates to all their suppliers, with Wal-Mart currently working out traceability standards for all fresh products.

Alan Steele, a director at TraceAll, said the company's customer base, already includes companies like Youngs Bluecrest, Dairy Crest, Greggs and the Food Standards Agency.

"Fast and resource-efficient ingredient and product traceability is increasingly becoming of paramount importance to food manufacturers around the world, especially in the area of product recall. As Europe's leading supplier of food traceability software, we are delighted to announce this partnership with Qmach, a leading supplier of food safety process control and compliance services, to assist our clients in better achieving their objectives.

"Food manufacturers have no choice but to comply with traceability legislation and recent events, such as the Sudan 1 food ingredient controversy and Cadbury's recent salmonella based product recall, have done little to appease public opinion and proves that operating out-dated paper-based systems is simply not effective," stated Mark Fuller, Qmach's business development director.

The requirements often leads to many key personnel being tied up in a paper chase, while consequential costs can spiral out of control through the inability to accurately and quickly quantify problems, the companies said.

In Qmach and TraceAll's experience the software system significantly reduces the time, effort and expenditure required to manage data and improve traceability. The Qmach and TraceAll solution enables companies to have global, secure, real-time, instant access to product and ingredient data.

"Removing obstacles to growth and delivering effective routes to market to allow our companies to successfully commercialise their technologies is critical to what we do at the Innovation Centre, and the new partnership between Traceall and Qmach is a good example of that," said Scot McRae, Innovation Advisor, Hillington Park Innovation Centre.