The difficult context we are experiencing, first with the pandemic and now with the war in Ukraine, is stressing global supply chains. These circumstances are contributing to increased levels of fraud in the food industry, and most especially in the dairy industry.

Suppliers and manufacturers of dairy products are forced to adjust production costs as much as possible to remain competitive in the face of price pressure from retailers and increasing competition from plant-based products. This often leads to substitution of ingredients for cheaper ones, which is a consumer fraud that can have very serious consequences for brands and dairy companies.

What are the main risks to quality and food safety in dairy companies? We asked our partners, customers and contacts through a survey on Linkedin in order to find out how to address the progressive increase of fraud and improve quality control in the dairy industry.

70% of respondents believe that the main problem is related to the lack of digitalization of quality control. Most suppliers and manufacturers are SMEs with little digitalization. And digitization is key to ensure efficiency:

• Greater automation
• Avoidance of human error
• Faster solutions
• Lower cost compared to external laboratories
• Control of all samples

The second most voted answer, with 13%, is the lack of control of all raw materials. Only by digitizing quality control with easy-to-use and implement in-house techniques is it possible to control all batches and ensure that the ingredients we are putting into the production chain correspond to the company’s quality standards and to the labeling of the final product.

Chemometric Brain is a software-as-a-service solution based on NIR technology, the most efficient and versatile for food quality control, as it analyzes any food sample in powder, liquid, solid or gel in just a few seconds, generating a chemical fingerprint of that product which is then compared with “correct” sample libraries to verify its quality, conformity and homogeneity.

Dairy companies that have started implementing this system have reduced the cost of their quality controls, gained in speed and efficiency and drastically reduced their level of incidents during production, avoiding subsequent complaints and even product recalls.

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