Case Study: How LIMS Helps Labs In Dairy Processing Achieve Food Hygiene And Safety

European legislation has consistently placed increasing pressure on the food processing industry to conform to the highest levels of food hygiene and safety. As one of Europe's largest dairy ingredient processing companies, Ingredia has a responsibility to conform to the industry standards while processing food products to meet its clients' rigorous demands. Ingredia are the leaders in the development and marketing of functional dairy ingredients. They are a registered supplier recognized by the biggest groups in the international food industry.

Ingredia processes 100,000 tons of dairy ingredients each year for use in chocolates, biscuits, dietary foods, ice cream, yogurts, cheese etc. The company has two laboratories that support six European sites, four in France, one in Switzerland and one in Poland.

The function of the laboratories is quite typical for food processors, and can be broken into R&D and manufacturing QA/QC. The two roles are very different, since the first area requires many different tests to allow the development of new techniques, while for QA/QC, many repetitive tests are carried out on various streams throughout the process. In total, the two laboratories at Ingredia run about 5,000 unique tests each week.

Read more...