Formula Control Scale with factory wide traceability installed at Country Maid - SG Systems LLC

Milwaukee based Country Maid invests in the Vantage Formula Control Scale with factory wide ingredient traceability & product recall system.

Once again, SG Systems is leading the way with their food traceability, formula control scale & product recall solution, this time with Milwaukee based, Country Maid.

Since 1962, Country Maid has been preparing delicious, high-quality dips, salads, side dishes and other fine food products designed to delight the individual tastes and ever-changing palates of American consumers from coast to coast.

Country Maid is family owned and operated. At their USDA-inspected food preparation facility in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, they create their entire menu offering by hand, using only the finest, carefully-selected ingredients.

With recent food traceability scares affecting thousands of US food companies (all food processing facilities) - food companies like Country Maid are faced with a choice as to how to address the traceability legislation from the incoming raw ingredients of products to their mixing, batching & blending process, through to the labeling of finished and repackaged goods. This can be an expensive and brand damaging problem to address if companies take the traditional and inadequate 'paper-trail' route.

Country Maids Management Team looked at traceability in a positive light and the company's President and CEO, Bill Carr comments on his approach to the problem 'food safety, product consistency and ingredient traceability is paramount to us and our customers. We are always exploring new techniques and systems available to ensure that not only are we leading the industry in this area but we are delivering the safest and most consistent products available.'

Country Maid decided to partner up with Dallas based SG Systems LLC. SG Systems pride themselves on their flexible approach to food traceability solutions and select only practical and well proven software and hardware to generate an ROI for their customers. Their employee selection process of "Traceability Experts on Demand" has produced one of the fastest growing and best loved traceability companies in the USA.

This combination of experience from SG systems combined with the drive and enthusiasm for production efficiency from Country Maid, has produced a remarkable traceability system which complies with even the most stringent legislation while delivering an ROI through improved yield at the Quality Control Points such as recipe weighing & finished product portion control.

The Vantage Formula Control Scale with Traceability Software Solution.

The Vantage Traceability Solution is a combination of hardware and software modules which integrate with the companies ERP System (MAS90), providing seamless control to the production floor where ingredients are weighed (spices, sauces and vegetables), blended and then packaged into different container sizes before being shipped to customers with fully traceable batch numbers. It starts by a review of the production requirements which are entered onto the SG Systems management software. This schedule provides the Vantage shop floor workstations with information relating to customer orders, delivery dates, items ordered and available inventory to 'deduct' from. The workstations take the form of touch screen Vantage production line Terminals (Recipe Formulation, Mixer Collation & Finished Product Portion Control & Packaging Stations), barcode scanners, label printers and heavy duty platform scale.

When the line supervisors select the relevant production order from the 'Vantage' touch screen display, it details how many batches of a particular product have been scheduled. Each formula is then weighed to a target weight (forcing the Operator to weigh accurately and work to weight tolerances set by management). Only when the formula is exactly within the weighing tolerance will a label be printed to identify the batch as 'ready for packaging'. All ingredient lot codes are recorded at this point for full traceability.

Each finished product label is unique and fully traceable. The label displays information such as the Batch Number, Formula code & description, Expiration Date, Mix Size & Job Number. As each label is generated, the Vantage System is adding product to available finished inventory to enable the Management Team to have real time production information based on actual throughput with yield collected from the production floor.

The Tightest Possible Production Control & Traceability
Being based on the well proven 'Vantage' traceability system, the reporting package has the ability to pinpoint which Lot Numbers have been delivered to which customers and when – all in real time. Simply enter the Lot Number into the PC and it will generate an 'ingredient dispatch' report giving emergency contact details in the event of a product recall.
The reports package also enables visibility of operator performance, production throughput, and production yield while generating no additional workload for the site staff.

Bill Carr comments on the Vantage System "To ensure the highest level of food safety & product quality for our customers we needed a traceability system which collected its data from real events on the production floor. SG Systems have provided us with a product which we have taken from an initial discussion to a working solution within a rapid timeframe by using proven 'building blocks' of traceability. Above all, the system is simple to use, easy to modify and generally popular with my team. The system provides traceability to comply with the most stringent food safety legislation and enables our process to score highly with the retailers requiring traceability".