How AI is changing the way food and beverage manufacturers prevent and manage recalls

Food and beverage producers have one overarching responsibility: to preserve the health of the public. It’s the reason they’re legally required to have a recall plan to remove unsafe stock from supply chains and shelves, immediately after a problem is detected.

So, how well — or badly — would your enterprise handle this process, in the unfortunate event of a food safety incident? A plan on paper and the ability to execute it are two different things. If a supplier called this afternoon to say an ingredient lot was contaminated, how long would it take your team to know every batch it went into, what’s still on hand and which customers received it?

Scores of food and beverage producers around the globe have learnt the answer to this question in recent times, from processors of frozen berries and salad greens to soft cheese and infant formula manufacturers.

Closer to home, a Victorian juice processor recalled two apple juice lines in July after an unsuccessful pasteurisation run led to mould contamination, while a South Australian cheesemaker recalled product the same month over E. coli contamination.

Undeclared allergens and microbial contamination were the leading reasons for food recalls from 2021 to 2025; responsible for 35% and 23% of recalls respectively, according to Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ).

Protecting the public and your reputation as a safe supplier

Whether the catalyst is an E. coli, Listeria or Salmonella outbreak, the detection of contaminants, or the failure to declare an allergen on product labelling, a product recall is a high-stakes exercise.

Preventing harm to consumers of the affected product is the ultimate object, and food and beverage manufacturers that fail to achieve this typically find themselves facing a cascade of negative consequences.

Should individuals become seriously ill or pass away, litigation is highly likely and reputational damage inevitable. Consumers may retain an unfavourable image of the brand responsible, and the food item itself, for an extended period of time. In extreme circumstances, that could be years, rather than months.

The effect on sales can be dramatic and manufacturers of multiple lines and categories typically find their other products are tainted by association.

Supermarkets and other retail outlets may also be loath to give hotly contested shelf space to a manufacturer whose products have become slow sellers because they’re under a cloud.

In a worst-case scenario, a severe food safety incident can render the manufacturer in question unviable financially.

Why a single source of truth makes AI more powerful

Against that backdrop, having the capacity to mitigate health and safety and commercial risks, by being able to identify affected product and recall it from supply chains, supermarket shelves and consumers’ fridges and pantries at speed, is critical.

That’s harder than it sounds for businesses that work with ingredients. A single supplier lot may be split across dozens of batches, blended into multiple finished products, reworked and shipped to hundreds of customers. Answering “where did it go?” means pulling together records from purchasing, quality, production, the warehouse, sales and finance.

At many mid-sized manufacturers, those records are stored in standalone systems and spreadsheets. A question that should take minutes to answer can require days of frenetic activity. Meanwhile, certification schemes such as BRCGS expect full traceability to be demonstrated within hours.

That’s where AI-powered enterprise resource planning technology with advanced track and trace capability has a vital role to play.

It can be used to maintain real-time, granular visibility over product at a unit level throughout the manufacturing process, from raw materials to finished goods. Choose a platform that offers advanced lot tracking and you’ll be able to swiftly ascertain where affected product is located, from the factory floor to the supermarket shelf and every place in between.

Preventing recalls at source

As always, prevention is better than cure. That’s why it pays to adopt a flexible solution with enhanced process control that helps you ensure quality steps and approvals aren’t inadvertently overlooked — an ever-present risk for manufacturers operating in manual or semi manual mode. It’s a proven means of reducing mistakes, strengthening traceability and boosting customer confidence.

A pasteurisation step that doesn’t run to specification, for example, is a process control failure — the kind that slips through all too easily when quality checks are recorded on paper or in someone’s head.

When those checks are enforced in the same system before a batch can move on, AI gains the reliable data it needs to spot quality results drifting across batches and suppliers, and can flag them for human attention and remediation. That means less chance of non-compliant product making its way out the door and resulting in a recall down the track.

Ideally, you’ll elect to partner with an ERP vendor with a peerless track record for supporting small and mid-sized manufacturers and whose platform has been developed with their unique requirements in mind.

Ensuring your manufacturing business is ‘recall ready’ in 2027

There’s no upside to a product recall, but should your manufacturing business have the misfortune to experience one, minimising the risk to the public by managing it efficiently is critical. Adopting AI-powered ERP technology with advanced track and trace capability will allow you to do just that — and to protect your brand and business in the process. If doing right by your customers, and safeguarding your enterprise financially and legally is a priority, it’s mission-critical technology that should sit at the heart of your operations.

Andrew Mamonitis, Vice President APAC, Manufacturing Division, ECI Software Solutions.

Top image credit: iStock.com/Eva Sanabria