Dawn Meats, working in partnership with everysite and food industry solutions provider Hellenic Systems, implemented an Integrated Checker service for verifying Red Tractor supplier assurance claims for Beef.
This integration means Dawn Meats can demonstrate that it checks the Red Tractor 90-day rule for each individual animal by directly querying the Red Tractor database securely and in real-time, saving time and preventing costly errors.
The system works by scanning the animal passport at the lairage and ensures that all farms listed on the passport are checked for Red Tractor Assurance status in a real-time ‘look up’ to the everysite Integrated Checker service. The Hellenic implementation of the service also checks the assurance status of the markets that each animal has passed through, adding further resilience to the verification of assurance claims being made by suppliers.
Validating more than assurance
The service also helps ensure that individual customer requirements for a maximum number of movements in the chain can be easily verified. This is an important step forward in helping reduce the risk of food fraud as recommended by the recent Elliott Review. In addition, requirements in Clause 5.4.4 of the BRC Global Food Standard Issue 7 require abattoirs to check assurance claims where the Red Tractor logo is used on finished product packs. The Integrated Checker service means it is a painless process to demonstrate compliance with Red Tractor, BRC and customer standards.
Current Red Tractor rules for beef cattle require animals to have been on an assured farm for at least the previous 90 days. Until now the only way to check Red Tractor Assurance for each animal has been to check all farms and markets that each individual animal has been on through the Red Tractor Assurance website. This is a manual, time consuming, error-prone and laborious process.
Industry backing
The project was backed by Red Tractor who are keen to ensure their certification data is made available to the industry in a secure and reliable way. Philippa Wiltshire of Red Tractor commented, “We are delighted that this service has been developed as the industry has been calling for a quick and accurate electronic way to verify the Red Tractor assurance status of animals for a number of years. Our recent consultation on Lifetime Assurance for Beef highlighted this type of system would be vital to support any future changes”.
Dawn Meats are already seeing the benefits of implementing the new service. Nick O’Toole, Dawn Meats UK IT Manager commented, “The new Integrated Checker service is saving us significant amounts of manpower checking assurance across five sites. It also helps us meet our customers’ supply chain requirements and those of the BRC Global Food Standard for proactively managing our supply chain”.
Terry Carter, Managing Director of Hellenic Systems Limited added, “We took the decision to integrate the Red Tractor service because it's what our customers need. They can see the value of automating what is essentially a time-consuming and error-prone manual task. We are more than happy to support Dawn Meats and our other customers in this way and look forward to rolling the new feature out to those who need to check Red Tractor assurance”.
Click here to find out more on how the Integrated Checker service can be implemented in your business.