The Company
One of the world’s largest food processors.
This business is one of the world’s largest suppliers of meat, poultry and related products — serving major foodservice chains and retail brands across multiple countries. With a complex multi-site European operation and a supply chain spanning hundreds of approved suppliers, the business operates at a scale where quality and compliance decisions carry enormous commercial and reputational weight.
The company has grown significantly through acquisition, meaning its operational infrastructure had not always kept pace with its footprint. When the Foods Connected partnership began, quality and food safety teams were managing spreadsheets, shared drives, and site-specific paper records — none of which gave leadership a reliable, consolidated view across the business.
The Challenge
Fragmentation at every level of the operation.
Every site had its own way of doing things. Audit checklists differed site to site. Supplier records lived in different systems. When a quality incident occurred, tracing it back through the supply chain was a manual, time-consuming process reliant on individual knowledge rather than structured data.
Non-conformances were managed by email and shared folders. Approvals and corrective actions took weeks and sometimes months to circulate. There was no reliable way to compare non-conformance rates across sites. When auditors arrived, teams spent the week before scrambling to pull documentation together.
The root issue wasn’t effort. Quality teams were working hard. The problem was that effort was going into managing process rather than managing risk. Data existed — it just wasn’t connected, standardised, or visible in real time.
The Solution
Standardise first, then digitise.
The rollout of Foods Connected began with a structured discovery phase — working with the quality team to understand how audits were actually conducted across sites, what information was being captured, and where the gaps were. The goal wasn’t to digitise the existing process as-is. It was to use the transition as an opportunity to standardise.
The first major output was a consolidated set of 27 standardised audit templates — replacing the patchwork of site-specific checklists accumulated over years. Every site now works from the same baseline, making it possible for the first time to compare audit performance meaningfully across the entire European operation.
The platform was rolled out section by section — supplier management first, then product checks, then non-compliance report (NCR) workflows. Supplier records, certifications, audit histories, and questionnaire responses migrated into a single searchable system. NCR workflows moved from email to in-platform, with corrective actions assigned, tracked, and closed with a full audit trail.
The Results
Real-time visibility that changed how the team operates.
The most immediate impact was visibility. Within weeks of go live, quality leadership had a consolidated view of audit performance, supplier compliance, and product check data across all European sites — something that had simply not been possible before.
The standardisation of audit templates surfaced non-conformances that had previously slipped through. Not because teams hadn’t been thorough - but because inconsistency in previous records made them hard to identify. Audit readiness became a continuous state rather than a sprint.
Tranformational changes:
- Quality incidents now identified from dashboard data, not end-of-period reports
- Supplier performance conversations backed by structured, comparable data
- New site integrations follow a defined onboarding process, not an ad-hoc one
- BRCGS and customer audit preparation has become a maintenance task, not a crisis
- The quality team’s time has shifted from data compilation to data analysis