What is the food industry?
The food industry includes businesses like restaurants, caterers, and food manufacturers. All these food businesses have similar challenges and concerns to deal with. Because they serve and/or prepare food for customers, they have to ensure customer safety as well as look after their employees. Areas for food businesses to address include:
Food safety and quality assurance
Just like how manufacturers need to turn out quality products, food businesses need to serve quality food. In this case, quality means safety; food safety is one of the most important concerns if you want to ensure customer safety and avoid fines.
Contamination, food spills, and foodborne illnesses can hurt your reputation and customer base. One way that businesses control this is by implementing an HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points) system to introduce a step-by-step means of finding and controlling safety hazards.
Supply chain disruptions
A food business depends on well-timed and functioning supply chains. Supply chain management is a challenge in the industry, since food is a perishable good, and so you don’t want to order too much in advance. Otherwise, you’ll wind up with excess food waste. Supply chain disruptions can therefore cause a lot of delays for a food business, and are sometimes unavoidable.
Regulatory compliance
In the food industry, there are two types of regulations to comply with. The first are rules surrounding workplace safety and any risks that employees are exposed to, and the second set of regulations to comply with refer to consumer safety.
Most of these regulations come from official local or federal agencies like OSHA, and failing to adhere to them can lead to fines or business closure if your business gets audited. There are also certifications that, while not mandatory, help your business a lot to obtain– most notably ISO certifications.
Sustainability
Food businesses are finding it increasingly important to operate sustainably, both because of environmental concerns and changing consumer preferences. This means making sure that your supply chain is energy efficient, that you’re minimizing the amount of food you waste, that you’re sourcing ingredients responsibly (such as buying local instead of from a factory farm), and more.
New technologies
Introducing new technologies in your food business can streamline the way you operate. Things like an online ordering service or inventory management software streamline administration and help you serve customers better.
At least in restaurants, digitizing these business functions has become the new normal. But the more complex the technology you’re trying to integrate, the more you need to train employees, invest in setting up new infrastructure, and make sure your information is secure.
Running a food business with Lumiform
Lumiform is the ideal solution for addressing all the challenges inherent in the food industry. With a combination of desktop software and mobile app, you’re able to manage daily and strategic tasks both on and off site.
Ensuring food safety is simple thanks to detailed and specific inspection checklists covering everything from HACCP to inventory management and energy usage. You or your employees can fill out these checklists online or offline, as long as they’ve been downloaded on the app.
Use these same checklists to meet regulatory requirements set by OSHA and other agencies. There are several pre-made templates that include all the criteria these agencies use when auditing food businesses for things like kitchen safety, emergency preparedness, and workplace safety.
Audit your business yourself for things like energy consumption and supplier evaluations to ensure you’re acting sustainably and stay ahead of any potential issues you might face along your supply chain. In terms of actually using the technology, Lumiform is as simple a solution as you’ll find. There’s no training needed to follow a checklist, since the app walks you through each step of your inspection.
Keep an eye on everything from the Lumiform dashboard, where you’ll see the status of every inspection, can assign new inspections, and can send reminder notifications when inspections are overdue. Finally, see the results of inspections at any time with automatically generated analytics that are stored safely in the cloud. Use these reports to understand which parts of your business need improvement and to plan these improvements.