Consumer Demand Has Become The Reason For Increasing Challenges For Food Processors.

How the food gets to our tables needs to be appreciated. But unfortunately, we do not think about all the various processes or tasks producers go through to allow us to walk into a grocery store and buy as we wish.

Fremont, CA: When walking down the snack aisle of a grocery store, we can see a variety of chip flavors ranging from salty to sweet to spicy. This explosion of new flavors, variations, and varieties of food and beverage products is wonderful for consumers.

 However, consumers today focus more on food processors than just making food available. Consumers need innovative, new, healthy, cost-effective, and environmentally neutral products. These demands act as a driving element for the food processing industry to adopt and implement changes and stay relevant and competitive.

However, with 80 percent of the food and beverage processors producing 100+ SKUs, also known as "SKU-mageddon," it needs a challenging move toward de-specialization that creates substantial issues and significant risks.

 Productivity's enemy is de-specialization; here are some of the main challenges.

• Inventory-  New ingredients and supplies mean introducing new products and flavors; this adds to the challenge of being in charge of new supplier relationships, new inputs, and a diverse inventory.

• Food Safety-   Every day, the food safety expenses rise as per the food and beverage production experts. Includes new inputs, new production workflows, and frequent transformation adds new risks and "fail points" for adulteration and contamination during the operations.

• Productivity- Regular changeovers lead to more downtime, lowering throughput, and reducing total productivity.

• Allergens-  the potential for allergens cross-contamination also increases with the increase in variety and sourcing of ingredients

 There are some key factors to focus on for a proactive, risk-based approach to prepare for the SKU-mageddon and deal with competition.

• Cleaning Production Tools- It is important to sanitize and clean the production equipment to protect the product quality and food safety. Even though SKUs rise and change over becoming regular, cleaning and hygiene play a vital role in blocking flavor carryover, allergen cross-contamination, and many food safety risks.

• Ingredient Inspection and Best Practices-  Inspecting inputs at the entry point is essential to maintain the production environment's integrity and safety. Especially with the variety of inputs, they increase the production of a more significant number of SKUs.

• Streamlining Sanitation and Food Safety Protocols- Sanitization, cleaning, and food safety protocols must account for this complexity when processing operations become more complex. Restaurants should review sanitization and food safety programs twice a year. Food Business Reviewwhenever a new ingredient is added to the operation.

• Special considerations must be taken for opportunities to simplify or streamline cleaning and sanitation during production changeovers. DE-specialization and increased changeovers are impacting throughput already; therefore, any advantage companies can extract via smarter cleaning and sanitization will bring a competitive advantage for the business.

The SKU-mageddon is accelerating day by day; introducing new products is currently the top growth strategy in the food and beverage industry. But with the challenges of de-specialization at times seems overwhelming, the truth is that the leading processors are not dealing with SKU-mageddon alone. Instead, they get along with a third-party vendor to deal with a specific pain point and formulate proactive strategies, to manage the challenges of de-specialization.

The food and beverage industry is constantly trying to stay equal with the demands of a changing consumer world. With increasing regulations and changing trends in the market, it is easy to keep sanitation, cleaning, and maintenance in the back seat and deal with the time-sensitive issues first.