Digital Transformation in Food Safety – Learnings from IAFP 2023 - Part 1

TITLE CARD: Neogen Analytics

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TITLE CARD: Learnings from IAFP 2023 Pt. 1

TITLE CARD: David Hatch, VP, Digital Solutions Marketing, Neogen

Dan Dwyer: Dave, what are some of the transformation breakfast that you led at IAFP this year?

[A screen shows a white screen with the title "Recent survey response" and "'Make Your Environmental Monitoring Data Count' Webinar: Delivered by Dr. Abby Snyder — Cornell University, May 16, 2023. 'n'=153 food safety professionals". The videos of David Hatch and Dan Dwyer speaking are on the right side.]

David Hatch: Thanks, Dan. Yeah, we were able to get some folks together on a panel — some of the people that have been the early adopters of digital automation for their food safety testing and sanitation programs. I led off the session sharing some data that we collected from a survey that was conducted in conjunction with Abigail Snyder — Dr. Abby Snyder from Cornell — who presented a session on "Best Practices and What to Do With Your Environmental Testing Data".

[The screen changes to a bar graph titled "Biggest Challenges with Food Safety Testing". The y-axis is percentages from 0–35%. The x-axis has the answers. "Determining what to do with the data", 26%; "Reporting and Interpretation", 18%; "Training of staff", 17%; "Slow time to results", 12%; "Complicated process/protocol", 9%; "Accuracy and confirmation", 8%; "Sample collection & preparation", 6%; "Other", 5%. The first 4 bars are circled in red with a comment: "Data use, data competency, Data availability".]

David Hatch: 153 food safety professionals responded to this and the first question that we asked was just, "Tell us about the biggest challenges that you're having with food safety testing." And, profoundly, respondents came back and said: Look it's really just figuring out what to do with all this data; we don't know. We have difficulty reporting and interpreting this information; training our staff on how to do this, and, the result of that, is we have a slow time to information.

David Hatch: Mike Gross from Café Valley Bakery joined us. He’s the VP of Food Safety and Quality there. And at the session he shared some of the transformative results of their team moving to digital automation.

[The screen cuts to a clip of the panel discussion. David Hatch stands at a podium. Five panelists are seated at a table beside him.]

Mike Gross: Having the ability to put into the system, where you can go in and put in as many sites as you want, because it made it easy, our technicians — people doing the swabs — really got enthusiastic because they really got into the process and we ended up with over a thousand sites! But, as a manager, I'm sitting back looking at the final reports and saying, "Okay, what's our presumptives and where are they happening and comes up I've got great pictures of the sites and stuff. What I didn't realize until I started digging into it a little bit — I forget what the trigger was — but the crew was so enthusiastic, because it was so easy to deal with this data load, that they had gone so far as to split drains to the north side of the drain versus the south side of the drain.

[The screen changes to a bar graph titled "Biggest Challenges with Food Safety Testing". David Hatch and Dan Dwyer are speaking on the right side.]

Dan Dwyer: Dave, did the members of the panel share their journey going from analog to digital?

David Hatch: It's a great question, Dan. You know one of the one of the survey findings led into that discussion.

[The screen changes to a bar graph titled "How Much of Your Food Safety Testing Data Is Digitized?" The y-axis is percentages from 0–40%. The x-axis has the answers. "Mostly Paper Records and Manual Spreadsheets", 37%; "50% Captured Digitally", 34%; "Most Data Captured Digitally", 18%; "Entirely Paper", 6%; "Entirely Digital", 5%. The first bar and fourth bar are circled and in red with a comment: "Paper and spreadsheets!". The last bar is in yellow with a comment: "Only 5% of respondents have digitized testing data."]

David Hatch: We talked about just the level of digitized data that exists within testing programs and those same survey respondents came back and told us, resoundingly, that almost half of them are still mostly or entirely paper-based today. So the movement there is slow, but Liane Ford who heads up Food Safety for Post Consumer Brands was on the panel and she made some interesting comments about their experience.

[The screen cuts to a clip of the panel discussion. David Hatch stands at a podium. Five panelists are seated at a table beside him.]

Liane Ford: There's less touches that have to be there. You don't need someone. You know, I remember you had to come up with the schedule — in the manual format — you had to come up with a schedule. The man-hours it took for somebody to come up with the schedule for the next month of what swabbing is and make sure everything was planned out every week for the technicians to do. You don't really have to do that anymore.

[The screen changes to a bar graph titled "How Much of Your Food Safety Testing Data Is Digitized?". David Hatch and Dan Dwyer are speaking on the right side.]

Dan Dwyer: Dave, one of the things we hear from customers is about the impact that digitization can have on the visibility of information across the enterprise. Is that something that was touched on by the panel?

David Hatch: It was, Dan.

[The screen changes to a pie chart titled "Collective Time Spent Preparing Data for Reporting Each Day". The chart has the answers. "<2 Hours, 52%"; "2–4 Hours, 39%"; "4–8 Hours, 7%"; ">8 Hours, 2%". The segments with greater than 2 hours are highlighted with a comment: "Almost half of respondents say they spend 2 or more hours PER DAY collecting, cleaning, and analyzing data for regular reporting to senior leadership." The segment with less than 2 hours is highlighted with a comment: "Even at 45–60 minutes each day is inefficient... This amounts to 10–12% of an eight-hour shift!"]

David Hatch: You know, it's interesting how we got there because one of the other data points that we shared from the survey was looking at the amount of time that organizations are spending just on reporting and developing reports for leadership. We found that almost half of respondents are spending at least two hours each day of doing this! And, as we dug into this, we found that it's really the manual processes that exist in organizations where information is in spreadsheets; it's in three ring binders and COAs; it's sitting over on someone's desktop; and bringing all that together takes time. Kim Simpson from McCormick Foods really summed it up well in describing the experience that they've had as a digitized information and how that has helped them to communicate with leadership.

[The screen cuts to a clip of the panel discussion. David Hatch stands at a podium. Five panelists are seated at a table beside him.]

Kim Simpson: Looking at our programs — our manual type programs — and seeing what we can to do better. Really, how can we make these programs more visible to our leadership? We talk about data, right? How can we get the analytics — not even at specific plants — but how can we, enterprise-wide, start looking at analytics and seeing if there's trends not only within one single facility, but in our facilities from a regional, global standpoint?

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TITLE CARD: Neogen Analytics