FoodChain ID expands to enhance product development, compliance efficiently and cost-effectively

“FoodChain ID has an awesome heritage focused around food safety and transparency … but increasingly, we have moved into digital solutions so that we can better meet the needs of our customers” by providing a number of products and certifications beyond Non-GMO Project, for which the company may be best known, CEO Conor Kearney told FoodNavigator-USA at the IFT FIRST event and expo in Chicago.

“Recently, we have added product formulation, regulatory compliance, supplement compliance, packaging compliance and then sustainability services – and a lot of that has been through acquisition. We have acquired 11 companies over the past six years,” he added.

Product development solutions for large, mid-market companies ​

Two of FoodChain ID’s recently expanded services, including one acquired with the Hamilton Grant in 2021, offer proactive insights to speed and enhance product development – an area of increased interest by CPG brands, like Kellanova​, Mondelez​ and Kraft Heinz, as they seek to reinvigorate volumes by ramping up innovation after a pause during the pandemic and following supply chain challenges.                                                                                                                

The company’s Formulation for PLM solution, which FoodChain ID showcased at IFT FIRST, is a plug-and-play solution for large enterprise systems that acts as a formulation workbench that gives proactive advice for regulatory, safety and company-specific needs during the development process.

The formulation workbench helps companies “avoid reworking [products] and the unproductive back and forth that happens between product development and regulatory,” Kearney said.

“When product developers are assembling their formulation and changing the relative weights of ingredients in the recipe, different proactive insights are popping up to them that, ‘Hey, this caffeine content violates regulatory limits in one of your target markets, so you need to adjust the content,” he said.

It also offers procurement-related suggestions, such as if a company wants to stay under a unit cost it will flag viable ingredient substitutions that are less expensive, he added.

The workbench can also save formulators from potentially expensive mistakes, such as if a potential product fails to meet the unit weight requirements for government funding programs, such as a set amount of vegetables by weight for products sold into the school meal program, Kearney said.

For companies that cannot afford more expensive product lifecycle management solutions, FoodChain ID also offers a cloud-based Recipes & Specifications service, which it gained when it acquired Hamilton Grant.

“FoodChain ID Recipe & Specifications is a cloud-based software solution for smaller companies that enables them to do much of the same thing as [FoodChain ID Formulation for PLM],” but for less, Kearney said.

“Suppliers can update different details about their ingredients [in FoodChain ID Recipes & Specifications] so the product developer can pull those ingredients into a formulation, which is constantly calculating,” and when the recipe is finalized “it will spit out a label,” he explained.

Both solutions address the common complaint that FoodChain ID hears, which is how frustrating and inefficient manual processes are.

“An end-to-end software that can do everything that a product developer needs to do is a big opportunity,” Kearney added.

Sustainability solutions​

FoodChain ID also recently teamed with ReSeed to launch the ReSeed Soil Carbon Methodology for carbon market initiatives.

The Soil Carbon Methodology “rewards farmers not only for maintaining existing soil organic carbon built through sustainable farming practices, but also for the removal and storage of additional carbon dioxide emissions in soils,” the companies explained when they announced the initiatives July 1.

“With ReSeed, we are providing verification services. So, when ReSeed is selling carbon credits to customers, we are providing the verification that the practices that those carbon credits are being sold on are valid,” Kearney said.

He explained: “We do an upfront audit to make sure that the practices are being put in place. And then we will be verifying that those firms are following regenerative practices in subsequent years. And there is any number of industries that are doing that, but I think food and beverage is a huge opportunity.”

Standalone regulatory compliance solutions​

FoodChain Id also offers standalone regulatory compliance software, including a regulatory library that allows users to look up regulations across more than 220 countries or regions.

“We have regulatory limits and databases that can basically tell you either for crop protection purposes or for food additive purposes, what the relative limits are, which can help exports and developers who are trying to figure out where they need to focus and what they need to work on,” Kearney said.

He added FoodChain ID also offers packaging compliance software that can flag how different types of packaging will interact with food and how to think about packaging when designing products.

Together, these solutions address what Kearney says is the No. 1 challenge in food safety, development and compliance, which is efficiently staying on top of ever changing and increasing compliance requirements while also managing costs and experience limitations.

“Food and beverage companies around the world are looking to become more efficient and productive and as such are reducing the size of their teams at a time when the industry is getting more complicated,” he explained. “So, being able to find the right information and apply it with judgement into a process” by people who might not have the right experience or capabilities, is a solution FoodChain ID can offer to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.