Westminster, CO -- (SBWIRE) -- 05/17/2013 -- “Are Your Ingredients Mere Commodities? Or, Are They “Precious” Commodities?” was recently published in Food Safety Tech; Carole Inman Vice President for sales and marketing at Specialty Food Ingredients discussed the current hyper-information age, where there is an increasingly complicated and scrutinized landscape of food safety compliance – not just by FDA, but by individual consumers.

Specialty Food Ingredients needed to easily manage compliance for the hundreds of foreign suppliers the company consistently utilize. Additionally, the mounting list of certification documents for Fair Trade, Organic status, Kosher certificates, and safety audits quickly calls for more sophisticated systems than previously analog ones.

Inman reported, “Arguably, the government, the media and consumers are more mindful of the safety of their food than ever in history. Some may be the publicity surrounding FSMA. More likely are the nightly news reports of the latest poultry, or produce or nut recall. With social media adding fuel to that fire, it’s no surprise that food manufacturers are paying more attention to food safety.”

Inman commented, “We invested in a digital documentation and supplier management system (in our case, we selected TraceGains.) The digitized, cloud-based system quickly made even our handling of the documentation related to food safety part of our overall brand promise. How it presented itself to our customers was usually in the swift retrieval of needed specs, COAs, certificates upon their request.”

TraceGains (http://www.tracegains.com) is for quality, purchasing, product development, and other departments, that are burdened with manually managing suppliers and documents. TraceGains delivers full-service supplier, compliance, and regulatory document management solutions, including FSMA and GFSI. Unlike manual, ERP, or traditional document systems, TraceGains extracts data from documents and automatically takes action. TraceGains is proven to empower people to quickly solve problems, speed audits, and simplify continuous product improvement.

Supplier documentation storage, whether in file cabinets or in digital formats, may satisfy regulatory retention requirements, but does little to systematically unlock the wealth of business, compliance, and regulatory information they contain and you require on a daily basis to operate successfully.

By automatically analyzing and scorecarding supplier-provided documentation as it is received—such as certificates of analysis, qualification questionnaires, audit documents and their results, certifications (Kosher, Organic, etc.), insurance certificates, allergen questionnaires, and other import requirements (COOL, C-TPAT, FSMA, GFSI), among others—TraceGains helps food and nutraceutical manufacturers and ingredient processors automate document management, meet regulatory and industry compliance requirements, identify best and worst suppliers, source better with less risk, automatically raise product quality, and painlessly perform or participate in audits, all without needing to involve the IT department to help with complex technology.

About TraceGains, Inc.
TraceGains customers experience on average a 56% reduction in out-of-spec lot receipts, and a 20% reduction in attribute variability, resulting in enhanced continuous improvement, better performing ingredient and raw material inventory, improved cash flow, and long-term brand protection. Follow TraceGains on Twitter at @tracegains.

TraceGains, Inc.
http://www.tracegains.com
Marc Simony, Director of Marketing
pr@tracegains.com
720-465-9400