World Food Safety Day : “Food safety, everyone’s business”

FarmERP shares light on the crucial role AgriTech plays in ensuring Safe Produce

Food safety and food security are interlinked. While climate change and environmental impacts on food chain are triggering food security problems, concerns about the safety of currently available agricultural products are growing to be equally grave. This coupled with the changing consumer patterns due to the current pandemic makes food safety & traceability an even bigger concern.

The second World Food Safety Day as declared by the World Health Organization, is set to be celebrated today, i.e. June 7,2020 to draw attention and inspire action to help detect, manage and prevent foodborne risks, contributing to food security, human health, economic prosperity, market access, agriculture, tourism and sustainable development. 

The theme for the year is “Food safety, everyone’s business” which aims to call upon countries and decision makers in the private sectors, civil societies, organizations affiliated with the United Nations and the general public to take action against food wastage and promote global food safety awareness. The WHO suggests the responsibility of Food safety be shared by governments, producers and consumers alike, where every stakeholder plays their role from farm to table to ensure that the produce consumed by us is safe and will not adversely affect our health, so as to reduce the socio-economic burden of foodborne diseases. 

According to a Health report by a European Food Safety Society, Agriculture is one of the key players when it comes to assurance of food safety. Agriculture can extend support through increased production and minimal processing, sharing data on trends in production, processes, food prices and commodity use by supply chains applying a holistic and risk mitigation approach, and ensuring hygienic production, processing and distribution of foods with established monitoring systems at every step of the way. 

Food Traceability is vital to the food supply chain in order to keep a tab on the hygienic production and distribution. Traceability refers to the functions that trace the flow of foods throughout the production, processing, and distribution stages. Traceability helps to locate a product at any stage within the supply chain, because of which it becomes imperative for producers to have integrated systems in order to ensure effective control of the operations to avoid any form of contamination. Having a structured traceability platform, can safeguard agriculture and food processing companies across the globe against any shortcomings regarding safety, allowing for a prompt response owing to the transparency and visibility in the chain, and accounting for diagnosis and mitigation of the incident.

Lack of visibility in sales and production cycles have been one of the major loopholes in the Fresh fruits and vegetable production industry. Mismanaged inventories result in failure to meet the ever-growing demand for fresh fruits and vegetables. This has propelled the sector to make a tectonic shift from manual supervision to digital farm management platforms like FarmERP to manage inventories, reduce losses associated with spoilage and work on sales forecasting, procurement strategies & ensuring food traceability & safety through a digital supply chain.

Agri Tech platforms like FarmERP have worked with companies in the past to source fresh produce directly from the farmers to the consumers an entirely digital supply chain to map all the operations. By providing the farm operators with an end to end digital and easy to use solution that covers the entire gamut of operations right from raw materials, to plantation, to harvesting, crop scheduling, scouting, processing, up until it goes for packaging and sales; ERP platforms are the future of food safety. 

FarmERP enables to provide traceable fresh produce to its clients & their customers through its agriculture management software with transformative technologies such as blockchain, etc. This gives consumers the transparency of backtracking and understanding the route of their food from farm to fork. With traditional agriculture in India making a historic shift to next gen technology like farm automation, Artificial Intelligence, GIS mapping, satellite imagery and big data analytics, the preference for ERP solutions is on a rise owing to the complete visibility of data and product life cycle across the entire supply chain from producer to consumer for agriculture-based businesses. 

The food we consume goes through multiple processes before it reaches the market & the consumer. It is highly important to make sure that the quality is maintained at every single stage. FarmERP offers a comprehensive platform for agribusinesses to identify, evaluate, and control the risky scenarios where food safety may be compromised. These future ready AgriTech platforms can help agribusinesses & growers retain high nutritional value of the produce during production, processing, storage, and preservation while mitigating post-production losses.