SCHAUMBURG, Ill. -- Imagine this scenario: An independent trucker, hired to distribute food to convenience stores but hurting from high fuel prices, decides to cut corners and turn off the refrigeration unit on his truck mid-trip, only to turn it on again right before delivery so product refreezes. It's a manufacturer, distributor and retailer's worst nightmare, but as Scott Ramminger told attendees of Tuesday's distribution education session at CSP's Foodservice at Retail Expo 2008 (FARE), that's exactly what a trucker admitted to in a conversation some 20 years ago.
"A chain is a series [image-nocss] of links," said Ramminger, moderator and president and CEO of American Wholesale Marketers Association (AWMA). "If there's an issue at any point, if the product is not handled properly from manufacturing to the retailer, it's not a good thing. "All links in the chain have to be connected."
Much time has passed since the trucker's confession—and hopefully he was the exception and retired by now, Ramminger said—but cold-chain distribution remains a chain with many untested links for the c-store industry. To present advice on how retailers and distributors can collaborate to ensure the freshest product for consumers, three panelists representing different facets of the chain provided details on their companies' best practices.
For Chad Prast, director of foodservice for Indianapolis-based Village Pantry LLC, the c-store industry is a much more rough, complex terrain in which to ensure food integrity than the supermarket chains in which he cut his teeth.
"Here, trucks pull up, there are no loading docks, which is a huge obstacle," he said. If a retailer doesn't have the right processes in place, product can easily be mishandled within the minutes it takes to place a food delivery in the store. Village Pantry has its distributor, Eby-Brown, directly deliver refrigerated food to the coolers, frozen food to the freezer and shelf-stable product to the store floor to minimize any dangerous downtime.
Distribution also has its own food safety mechanisms. John Paul, corporate food safety and quality assurance manager with Eby-Brown Co. LLC, Naperville, Ill., noted that the distributor performs visual checks when accepting trucks from suppliers. It's a courtesy Eby-Brown extends to its c-store customers. "It's a check and balance on both sides," said Paul.
And one that requires an investment in training, time and resources for all participants in the chain. Doug Eisenhart, c-store foodservice manager for Dot Foods Inc., a redistributor of food products to wholesalers based in Mount Sterling, Ill., said that making the adequate capital investment in ensuring food safety is probably the biggest factor in preventing foodborne illness. Dot Foods facilities feature multiple temperature loading zones to handle the mix of refrigerated and frozen foods that pass through the docks each day. It requires not only a sizeable financial investment, Eisenhart said, but also "top-level commitment to a food-safe culture."
Beyond food safety, distribution also directly impacts food quality. As Prast with Village Pantry noted, "If something [perishable or frozen] sits out for 15 minutes, it's not a health issue but a quality issue." And it's a liability nearly as poisonous to customer satisfaction and loyalty as a genuine food-safety threat. To prevent such slip-ups requires employee buy-in; Prast said that Village Pantry store managers and employees are indoctrinated with the importance of minimizing any "down time" a refrigerated or frozen food might have in room temperature.
Eby-Brown aims to prevent wide temperature variances through the use of temperature recorders, placed in its suppliers' trucks, its own distribution fleet and in c-store customers' coolers and freezers, as well. This provides not only a solid record of a product's handling, it also helps expose any of those weak links in the chain that can compromise food integrity.
Of course, as any retailer embroiled in a salmonella, E. Coli or other food-safety scare can attest, it takes only one slip up to upset any customer trust built up over many years.
"The worst thing that can happen for any of us is to turn on 60 Minutes and find out 20 people died eating food at a convenience store," said Ramminger. "It will derail the growth we're enjoying right now."
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