Foods Connected, members of Northern Ireland Chamber of Commerce, was founded in Northern Ireland in 2012. Their end-to-end software solutions simplify the food industry supply chain, optimising spend and unlocking crucial data for food and drink manufacturers, retailers, food service providers, and other food businesses worldwide. The concept for the platform was founded on addressing the challenges that the industry faces daily, by delivering complete digitalisation of core supply chain activities to the food industry.

Today, its tools are utilised by hundreds of leading food businesses globally, including ten of the world’s largest retailers. With £20bn of product information being managed in the system every year, customers call Foods Connected ‘innovative’, ‘adaptable’ and ‘efficient’.

The Foods Connected platform covers 7 solution areas: Food Safety & Quality, Sustainability and ESG, Product Lifecycle Management, Protein Optimise, Procurement, Supplier Compliance and Traceability. These solutions have been applied to drive real-life results for customers.

Zertus, a European food manufacturer, was spending hours entering information manually into spreadsheets, making processing data inefficient and slow. Using the Supplier Compliance solution, the team can now access and manage all supplier information digitally and no longer need spreadsheets at any of the four sites. Since digitising, the time Zertus spends on administrative tasks has decreased by 50% and human error has been greatly reduced. Traceability exercises now take half the time they used to, reduced from 4 to 1-2 hours, forms are sent out automatically, data is online and available in real time, and supplier approval can be reviewed quickly and easily.

Hilton Foods has used the Foods Connected platform to digitally transform its business from using outdated data processing methods to hosting supplier and product information in one centralised location. The results yielded by them from the Supplier Auditing tool alone have been significant, with an approximate 40% saving in time needed to carry out the audit end-to-end. Adopting the tool has allowed the customer to expand business operations, transitioning to an increased auditing capacity of 300 audits per year. It is estimated that using the Foods Connected platform has delivered an end-to-end saving of 30-40% per annum, with return on investment now at 550%.

Leading UK food producer Finnebrogue used the Food Safety & Quality solution to digitise its entire supply chain. Previously, Finnebrogue managed 250+ suppliers across four state-of-the-art sites, entirely using spreadsheets. The teams often found that supplier compliance certificates were out of date and would fail audits, despite being compliant themselves. Since digitising with Foods Connected, as well as saving time with around four working weeks claimed back from admin tasks each year, everything the technical department now does is through the Foods Connected platform, and they have been able to implement processes that ensure their entire supply chain stays compliant and audit ready.

Today, one of the leading retailers cites Finnebrogue’s digital approach as an example to other producers and has now brought this as an industry standard.