A Calgary software company says its new analytics software will help farmers make data-driven decisions using information gathered for food safety regulation compliance.
“It helps them to correlate any kind of quality outcome, good or bad, for all the variables leading up to it,” said Kevin Davies, chief marketing officer at Provision Analytics, of the new software. “It’s basically driving operational insights out of analytics using food safety data.”
The software takes information gathered from all the regulated documentation requirements from seed, spray, harvest, wash, cut and packing of a product and stores it on a singular digital platform.
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That can save revenue in a worst-case recall scenario but it also reduces the need to document on paper the same procedures, said Davies.
He used the example of a listeria outbreak caused by a piece of equipment as how the software can laser focus on affected products.
“In Provision, you can trace back to view that equipment on a certain date range and see all the products that might have passed through it and gotten listeria contamination,” said Davies. “It just connects all of the data so you have greater visibility from any one variable to any related outcome.”
As for immediate practical uses, “companies will have an immediate cost savings just in data entry and often times that alone covers the cost of the product,” he said.
The bonus of using digitized software comes from being able to use that data to locate problems proactively or identify positive outcomes and be able to replicate them, said Davies.
“Once companies have data, they are able to make decisions that reduce their operating costs, improve their quality control. We’ve had clients who have reduced their food loss dramatically,” he said.
Using food safety data alone, Davies says the software can track both water and energy consumption of production as well.
Provision Analytics announced recently Sunterra Greenhouse will be adopting the new software as part of its new 20-acre greenhouse producing primarily tomatoes but also two acres of strawberries.
The software will allow compliance tracking for CanadaGAP (Good Agricultural Practices) certification at the greenhouse.
Davies said Provision worked with the CanadaGAP program during development and incorporates all of its manuals and forms in the software.
As more farms move to digital record keeping due to ease of use of technology, Davies said the software can be adapted to just about any type of agricultural production.
“It’s a flexible system that can work across the food supply chain and the benefit of that is it’s a common tool that can be used by both the processor and the farms that supply them.”
