Advantage Traceability Profile:
Pine River Cheese & Butter Co-operative

Traceability system gives customers added confidence

For well over a hundred years, the Pine River Cheese & Butter Co-operative has been making high-quality cheeses packed with rich flavour.

Organized by producers on the shores of Lake Huron, Pine River Cheese is one of the few remaining farmers' co-operatives in the province. It produces more than 1.1 million kilograms of cheddar, Colby, Monterey Jack, flavoured cheeses and curds each year, destined for sale on-site at the plant just south of Kincardine or through major grocery chains across Ontario.

Some things haven't changed over the past century. Pine River Cheese continues to take an old-fashioned approach to cheese making, starting with fresh whole milk and aging its cheeses naturally. The result is superior

Figure 1: Bill Rutledge, General Manager of Pine River Cheese & Butter Co-operative.

Pine River Cheese & Butter Co-operative installed:

• eQ Trace System from Verify Technologies
• Zebra Printer for lot code labeling of finished products
• Wireless handheld PDAs
• An interface with Accpac, their existing financial software package

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  taste and texture that have won generations of loyal customers.

  But while the co-op is proud of its heritage, it's not afraid to experiment with new lines. It recently launched a number of smoked cheeses, spreadable cold-pack cheeses and cheese fudge, a decadent combination of havarti, icing sugar and cocoa powder that is going over "like crazy," according to General Manager Bill Rutledge.

  "We're trying to find products that nobody else has," he explains. "We're very flexible about looking at further or value-added products."

  Now Pine River Cheese is applying that progressive attitude to their plant operations, differentiating themselves from their competitors by adopting a traceability system.

  In 2007, the co-op signed up to participate in the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs' Traceability pilot program. It's an initiative designed to help food growers and processors track vital information at each stage of production and distribution, empowering businesses with the ability to conduct faster and more accurate product recalls when necessary.
  
  Working with a consultant, the co-op installed eQ Trace - traceability software developed with the food-processing sector in mind - and began capturing lot numbers from the raw materials that go into each batch of cheese.

  Once the cheeses have been formed and cut, the blocks are labeled and scanned into the system, linking each block to the inputs used to produce it and giving staff instant access to inventory figures.

  When orders come in, employees on the sales desk enter them into the system, where they can be downloaded onto handheld PDAs (personal digital assistants) for order picking. As warehouse workers fill each order, they scan the product bar codes, automatically linking key data such as manufacturing date, best before date and batch number to the customer.

  Implementing the system required substantial amounts of staff time to develop new processes, source and install equipment, train employees, and get everything running smoothly. However Rutledge anticipates a good return on investment when they go live in early 2009.

  One of the major benefits will be better inventory management. There are approximately 515,000 kg of cheese in the warehouse at any given time, and until now the co-op has relied mainly on physical counts to know how much of each product was in stock.

  A traceability system changes all that. "I've got real-time inventory at all times," says Rutledge. "Anybody can check to see what's on the shelf if a customer calls, to make sure we have product and we can fill the orders."

  The co-op will also see greater business operational efficiencies. Because the eQ Trace software integrates seamlessly with the co-op's Accpac financial system, it makes invoicing faster and also gives the co-op new sales reporting functionality.

  Order picking will become quicker and more accurate as employees simply scan barcodes on the cheeses electronically, rather than recording product information by hand.

  Most importantly, however, it speeds up and fine-tunes Pine River Cheese's recall capabilities. In the past, if a problem arose with a particular batch of cheese, employees had no way to pinpoint precisely which customers were affected. Recalls were a costly process in terms of staff time, lost product and public image.

  Now, thanks to the new software system, Rutledge can call up a report listing all the customers that have actually received the cheese in question. "You just click on the report and it tells you exactly what customers got that particular batch number," he explains.

  That's a definite advantage both for Pine River Cheese and the stores that carry it. "You're not calling customers who don't have the product on the shelf and bothering them - you're only calling the ones who you know did get the product," says Rutledge.

  In an industry where public trust is paramount, Rutledge believes Pine River Cheese's new traceability system will make the co-op more attractive to retailers. "It gives them a little more confidence in your products," he says.
  

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  Traceability brings benefits:
  

  By implementing a traceability system, Pine River Cheese & Butter Co-operative:

  • Improved recall specificity and speed
  • Improved inventory management
  • Improved the speed and accuracy of invoicing
  • Gained sales reporting functionality

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  "You just click on the report and it tells you exactly what customers got that particular batch number."

  - Bill Rutledge, General Manager, Pine River Cheese & Butter Co-operative

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  Funding for the Food Safety Initiative Traceability Grant Program and Pilot Project was provided under the Agriculture Policy framework, a federal-provincial-territorial initiative.

For more information:
Toll Free: 1-866-641-3663
E-mail: advantage@ontario.ca