Changing Your Ingredient Supplier? Don’t Leave Quality to Chance.

Several reasons exist for food production companies to change their ingredient suppliers, including rising prices, supply chain disruptions, a pattern of poor service (missed or incomplete deliveries, bad communication, etc.), or inconsistent ingredient quality.

As with any significant business decision, choosing a new ingredient supplier comes with risks. The supplier may offer a particular ingredient at a better price, but how can you know how it will consistently produce the products at the quality and consistency your customers expect? Thankfully, several tools are available to help you assess ingredient quality and understand how it will perform in your unique production process before making the big switch.

Moisture, Fat, and Compositional Analysis

Let’s take chocolate, for example. Chocolate is an essential ingredient for many baked goods and snack foods, and there are many suppliers for bakers to choose from. A straightforward way for bakeries and other food manufacturers to validate chocolate supplier quality is with near-infrared NIR analysis. Whether used in a lab or at-line, benchtop NIR analyzers are equipped with robust, tried & true calibrations to quickly analyze chocolate for properties like fat, sugar, lactose, and other parameters with each chocolate delivery.

Analysis with NIR systems is typically finished within 30 seconds, helping the company save the time and expense of outsourcing their product samples to quality testing labs.

From corn starch to seasoning sprays, thousands of NIR calibrations help food producers ensure ingredient quality and validate suppliers quickly and accurately.

Managing the Appearance of New Ingredients

Even if all production processes remain the same after switching to new ingredients, changing ingredients can influence the final product appearance in various ways, which may require the manufacturer to make production decisions to accommodate the changes.

As another example, a producer of breaded chicken patties is considering a new breading supplier. With the help of vision inspection technologies, used at-line or over-line on a production conveyor, the manufacturer can objectively assess products exiting the fryer for final product color and texture. Additionally, it can immediately detect whether the adhered breading survived the frying process and can adjust the fryer settings or batter recipe to correct the error.

The Right Tools to Make Your Supplier Switch Seamless

Your customers expect consistent products that look and taste the way they expect every time, and your transition to anew ingredient supplier should always maintain that experience. Arming your operations with quality assurance tools that quickly and accurately validate products to your ideal standards can generate a fast return on investment while holding suppliers accountable. Speak with us today to discuss your quality assurance plan.