News
Fast Tracking Fast Food - traceability means reliability
25.05.2010
How do you quickly identify a single bread roll when you make 2 million of them in a day?
What do you need to find a single batch of burger buns? Swedish based Lantmännen Unibake can trace the suppliers of the raw materials from an individual package in point of sales in less than 15 minutes.
Lantmännen Unibake in Sweden sells hot dog and burger buns to the catering trade and retail stores. Under the Korvbrödsbagarn brand they supply to Burger King, Max, 7 - Eleven, Sibylla and several chains of petrol stations. As a food company that serves the world with a perishable product, being able to accurately trace goods isn’t just a legal requirement, it’s a competitive advantage.
Facts
Lantmännen Unibake produce
- 2 million rolls a day
- 6 days a week
- All year round
Logistics Manager Peter Lindgren needs to be able to track huge volumes of raw materials and finished goods at any time.
Peter Lindgren: "We use the Consafe Logistics Astro WMS™ and RetroSpect™ systems for traceability and production flow. We can check a bag of rolls and know exactly from which batch the flour came. The system connects all raw materials and tracks all shipments, registering deliveries and even the temperature when the raw materials were received in our warehouse. With the number of bread rolls we make each day, having that kind of information available at our fingertips means we can identify and test our materials and products quickly and efficiently. If there’s a problem with a single roll, we know where the ingredients for the products in that bag originated from."
From source to shelf
Lantmännen Unibake has only 11 staff managing their warehouse in Örebro, even though the volumes they are dealing with are huge. Peter Lindgren says, "We use the Astro WMS to control the complete flow of goods through the warehouse. Everything is linked through the system".
The traceability routines are like this:
- Scan incoming goods
- All received and produced goods are assigned an EAN 128 label
- All production orders are treated like picking orders
- Each production order contains a picking list
- The system scans picks for recipes
- It scans pallets of raw materials
- Materials are then linked to a batch number
By scanning everything, every time something is moved, Lantmännen Unibake has complete traceability through the entire production chain – from corn to consumer you could say.
Peter Lindgren explains, "When a pallet is fully packed we attach an EAN 128 label and it goes into the freezer. We scan every movement so we know everything about the whole chain. We know which pallet has gone to which customer. Even where we have pallets containing mixed goods we know exactly which mother pallet everything comes from by scanning the pallet label. Scanning is the key to tracking everything".
From all finished goods the company can trace what raw materials are used for the batch and trace in all directions. Operators can take any pallet containing raw materials and see which pallets they have made from these, where the goods came from and which customers have received them.
