Advantage Traceability Profile: T&R Sargent Farms Inc.Traceability Attracts New Customers to Poultry ProcessWhen your business grows 1,000 per cent over the course of 15 years, you're clearly doing something right. For Milton-based chicken processor Sargent Farms, the secret was a willingness to overhaul their operations - not just once during that period, but three times - in order to grow and thrive. In 1999 the family-owned company focused on becoming a niche marketer of poultry allowing them more market access for their food products. They followed that up by implementing HACCP, a rigorous system of food safety that more and more food industry customers are demanding as a prerequisite to doing business. Most recently, Sargent Farms helped to pilot the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs' Traceability program, a move intended to improve their inventory management, attract new customers and increase their ability to follow products from farm to table. 
Figure
1: Charlene Giguere, Office Administrations
and Human Resource Manager, T&R Sargent Farms Inc.
T&R Sargent Farms installed:
Traceability is a process to help food growers and processors track vital information at each stage of production and distribution, allowing them to conduct faster and more accurate product recalls when necessary. Putting that process in place at Sargent Farms involved plenty of late nights, says Office Administrations and Human Resources Manager Charlene Giguere, but everyone from maintenance staff to the plant manager stepped up to the challenge. Most employees were quick to recognize that the new system would improve efficiency and, in many cases, make their jobs easier. Even the few initial naysayers, reluctant to abandon old methods, embraced the new processes and technology when they were invited to participate in planning meetings. "Once you involve them, they are the ones who come up with some of the best ideas," says Giguere. "When other people see them doing it and buying into it, then they'll buy into it too." Over the course of nine months, an interdepartmental team tackled changes big and small, from installing extra electrical outlets for new barcode scanners to completely rewriting shipping and receiving processes. New systems electronically track every input, from the truckloads of chickens that arrive from across Ontario and Quebec to individual lots of ice, containers, plastic liners and labels. At the other end, each box of product is labeled and scanned before it's shipped out, allowing staff to track orders back to specific production batches. The payoffs were worth all the effort. Most significant, perhaps, was attracting two new customers: major retailers who normally insist on buying only from larger processing plants. "When they came in and saw that we have HACCP and that we have traceability, they decided to deal with us," says Giguere. "It was quite a coup." Traceability benefits extend to the plant floor, where order picking and shipping have become faster and more efficient. Now employees simply scan the barcode on the finished product instead of recording shipment information by hand. The new system also ensures the accuracy of each shipment, alerting employees if they try to scan incorrect product to fill an order. "There are no more mis-shipments. It's really a huge advantage," says Giguere. As a result, the company no longer needs to spend time and money correcting faulty orders. And when it comes to conducting a recall, what would have taken three hours can now be done in 15 minutes. Instead of tracking back an input using a time-consuming combination of paper records and physical inventory counts, a few keystrokes do the job. Not only that, any problems can be narrowed down to a specific lot, rather than an entire invoice's worth of product. So was implementing traceability a smart business move? Giguere doesn't miss a beat. "Absolutely," she says. "It not only sped up our operations - procurement, sales, logistics and inventory control - it allowed us to save money and helped bring new customers on board." Traceability Can Help your businessBy implementing a traceability system, T. & R. Sargent Farms:
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: |
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