Superior Food Safety has partnered with Icicle Technologies Inc. to bring Icicle, a smart food manufacturing software, to the food & beverage and the growing industries.
You might believe that it somehow gets easier and faster to create HACCP plans, as well as update existing ones with new information, once you find a groove.
You’d be wrong.
Even if you delegate tasks effectively, keep all your information organized in one place, and create a regular task for updating plans, you’ll still spend countless hours getting everything prepared. That’s countless hours of finding the right documents and records, countless hours double-confirming accuracy to avoid errors, countless hours typing in new information and printing it all out — every single time something in your business changes.
There’s only one way to fight the complexity and time-consuming nature of this task: automate it.
Imagine Creating New HACCP Plans in Seconds
Let’s say you’re reformulating a line of products to replace sugar with honey as a new ingredient. Normally, this would mean a nightmare for updating all your HACCP plans — dozens of hours, at least.
But not for you. You put honey as an ingredient into your software and it automatically suggests hazards you need to include in your HACCP plan based on intelligent algorithms. Once you approve the smart suggestions and begin adding honey to all your reformulated products, the software carries over all the hazards associated with honey to each new product.
You simply click a button, and a new, accurate HACCP plan is generated with all of the relevant changes already filled in automatically for each reformulated product. You don’t have to work through hundreds of pages by hand to make sure you’ve added honey in all the right places. No need to copy and paste hazards hundreds of times.
That’s because Icicle doesn’t fill out paperwork like other food safety solutions. Instead, Icicle creates a dynamic model of your business that understands the relationship between ingredients, allergens, hazards, and regulatory requirements, helps you make those associations, and updates changes automatically through your whole system. That means that it’s not just your food safety staff who see these changes; it’s your QA manager who needs to get your vendor certifications in order, your warehouse team that needs to make sure they ship out product well before its expiration date, and even, if you grant permissions, your auditors and inspectors. Icicle’s one-click HACCP plan does it all for you.
How Icicle’s One-Click HACCP Works
Like most food manufacturers, you’re far too busy for all the work it takes to keep accurate, timely HACCP plans. Even if you somehow manage to make it work, your business growth suffers from all the lost time. Templates and tools alone can’t keep you from spending dozens of hours each month on HACCP-related work because they don’t integrate with your systems and software. You still have to do most of the hard work by hand.
Icicle takes a different approach, creating a single, interconnected ecosystem for your entire business — sales, receiving, food safety, traceability, and beyond. This fully integrated approach paves the way for one-click HACCP plans:
- Your data is universal across all connected departments. Anytime data is uploaded into the ecosystem, like new ingredients or workflows, Icicle automatically updates that data point in every other area of the business so that every department has up-to-date information, saving you hours upon hours of manual adjustments.
- Intelligent algorithms help you identify hazards. Icicle compares your operation to others in our food safety database, the largest in the world, to identify and suggest potential hazards: biological, physical, chemical, and radiological hazards that others face with similar facility types, ingredients, and process flows. This means you never start from scratch, saving massive chunks of time on hazard analysis and research.
- Then you can create HACCP plans in just one click. When everyone’s working within the Icicle ecosystem — normal day-to-day work — you have an ever-updating database that allows Icicle to simply compile your data and smart suggestions to create fully compliant HACCP plans in seconds.
And the great part is, getting your business and team setup within Icicle doesn’t take years. It takes just a couple of months.
When Villa Cappelli came to us, they had been told it an auditor would arrive to inspect their olive oil facility in just six weeks. Their artisanal operation was without a single HACCP plan. Thankfully, we were able to set up an entire HACCP program in that time. With Icicle’s dynamic templates, smart suggestions, and excellent customer support, Villa Cappelli passed their inspection with flying colors.
“Smart suggestions streamlined things and the flow charts made everything clear. This saved me a ton of time and paper. The inspection went very well. All our documents were up-to-date, making us look more professional than I think he expected.”
Steven Crutchfield, Head of Production and Product Innovation for Villa Cappelli
Like Steve quickly discovered, being able to create HACCP plans in just one click turned out to have dramatic impacts on his business. And it can for yours, too.
What One-Click HACCP Plans Mean For Business Growth
When you can create HACCP plans at the touch of a button, it’s not just your food safety program that sees impact, but every part of your business. Here are some of the areas that see the most transformation.
- Faster, easier audits and inspections. Auditors love seeing facilities that automate HACCP plan creation and updates, because it means they’re far more accurate. And when you can pull up plans, automated transparency reports, and food safety records in seconds, you can reduce inspection time by as much as 90%.
- Your customers will trust you more. Food brands love an organized manufacturing partner, and showing them how you master your food safety program takes a huge weight off their shoulders and makes you a low-risk partner.
- More resources to dedicate to growing the business. When you’re not constantly facing clerical and food safety struggles, you and your team are free to pursue the things that matter most to your business.
Take it from Felix Irnich, COO of DaVinci Gelato, who had been told it would take 1-2 years to create a HACCP program from scratch — and who we helped make on in just three months:
“On a day-to-day basis, Icicle saves probably at least one hour per person. Icicle is churning away and running smoothly. There’s no stress, no giant pile of paperwork that needs maintenance. It’s paying for itself, especially by helping us expand into other [markets] easily.”
Felix Irnich, COO of DaVinci Gelato
As regulations become more cumbersome, labor expenses rise, and customer expectations evolve, automated HACCP plan creation and updates will only become more essential. Facilities that stay the by-hand course will inevitably fall behind those who proactively set themselves up for success in this area.
And the best part? You could be making one-click HACCP plans in as soon as four weeks.
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