Kezzler will this week feature among the speakers at the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) Conference in Seattle.
The annual event brings together key supply chain actors from around the world to discuss and drive innovation in the industry in pursuit of improved food safety.
As global supply chains become increasingly complex and at risk of counterfeiting the role of technology in preventing repeats of food safety-related incidents, from the 2008 case of adulterated infant formula in China to the 2018 E. Coli outbreak in the U.S., is a high-priority area for discussion.
Kezzler has been invited to speak in a break-out session entitled ‘Information Optimization – leveraging and managing public information’, in which CEO Christine C. Akselsen will set out how the company’s technology is bringing transparency to the world of food.
The Conference is set to feature speakers from industry giants such as Nestle, McDonalds, Amazon and Starbucks. Kezzler will be represented at the event by Akselsen along with members of the company’s US team.
Safety and Sustainability
Kezzler’s technology enables full supply chain visibility for every product, from ingredients through to consumption. Each manufactured item is enhanced with a unique digital identity that is printed on the product and managed by a cloud solution. This enables brands to meet traceability requirements, provide protection against counterfeits using authentication, and better manage and mitigate recall requirements. It also supports them to provide consumers with personalized content.
Referencing their recent partnership with FrieslandCampina’s infant formula brand, FRISO, as a case study, Kezzler will share insights from the industry’s first grass-to-glass traceability and consumer engagement campaign. Akselsen will explain how the solution has empowered parents to make informed purchasing decisions and opened up an exciting new dynamic channel for the brand to talk to their consumers directly.
Speaking ahead of the event Akselsen said, “Kezzler is at the forefront of unit-level traceability, with the ability to change the global food industry forever by making every single product digitally unique and interactive. We have been proud to support FrieslandCampina in their mission to bring safe and sustainable products to consumers. We expect that this level of transparency will soon be expected for all consumer products.”
Highlighting the importance of the project to FrieslandCampina, the company’s Senior Project Manager Hans Wessels has stated, “Ensuring our consumers can have full confidence in FrieslandCampina brands is paramount. This is why we have adopted Kezzler’s serialization technology to deliver supply chain visibility for our infant formula brands, as well as providing a way for stakeholders throughout the supply chain to validate their products in real-time.”
A Unique Solution
Kezzler’s solutions are built to scale within the space of FMCG, offering flexibility and scalability with low operational burden through integration with various other systems in the supply chain.
“With the Kezzler solution consumers are given traceability and other information within milliseconds. As an example, Kezzler is handling more than two million unique consumer interactions per day for a single client with negligible latency,” Akselsen stated.
“The Kezzler solution is blockchain compatible. Kezzler has the opportunity to integrate to blockchain for additional trust purposes by writing selected data to blockchain or to read data from a blockchain,” Akselsen explained.
Kezzler technology uses a rule-based system where it looks for suspicious scanning patterns that have the power to uncover unauthorized distribution, counterfeit attempts, duplicates and fraud in relation to loyalty systems.
“We have a rule-based system that has been set-up in order to raise alarms, however, it has also been built to limit the number of false alarms that might occur throughout the supply chain,” said Akselsen.
Implementation in the Food Industry
Using their recent partnership with FrieslandCampina’s infant formula brand, FRISO, as a case study, Kezzler explained how their solution could be implemented for any food product in the industry.
“A project with a CPG company often starts with just one SKU, manufactured at one facility that acts as the first step of our global rollout. In the case of FRISO, we began in Hong Kong. However, the TrackEasy solution is now being rolled out globally. There is no doubt that in this first stage of implementation, the most important stakeholders are both enterprise and factory IT, due to their importance in helping us integrate with other systems (ERP, MES, WMS, DMS, CRM),” Akselsen stated.
“The Kezzler solution has been designed to be effortless for our clients, meaning there is as little change to their operational procedures as possible, ”she emphasized.