Kyle Anderson, Foods Connected's President of US, on the supplier blind spot most food businesses miss and what they can be doing to close it.
Twenty-five years in the food industry – as a quality manager, then in technical and quality roles, and now leading Foods Connected's operations in the US – has taught me the same lesson from a dozen different angles: the biggest risk to any food business isn't inside its own four walls. It's everything that happens before a product reaches them; with the suppliers, growers, and partners they never see directly.
In 2013, the horsemeat scandal broke across Europe. Products labelled as beef turned out to contain undeclared horsemeat – in some cases, entirely. I remember reading that one French-made "beef" lasagne was 100% horsemeat. Millions of products were pulled from shelves. Reputations that had taken decades to build were damaged in weeks.
What stayed with me wasn't the scandal itself, but what it revealed: almost none of the businesses affected could say with confidence where their ingredients had actually come from. That gap between what a label says and what a supply chain can prove is exactly where product security lives or dies.
Since then, I've watched the same pattern repeat with different ingredients and different headlines – beef labelled as British origin that turned out to be sourced from South America and Europe, African swine fever moving through livestock supply chains in Italy and Southeast Asia. Different causes, same lesson: a weak link anywhere in the chain becomes everyone's problem.
Consumer trust in food brands has taken repeated hits – from contamination cases to allergen mislabelling to outright fraud. Rebuilding it starts with a supply chain that can actually prove where a product has been, not just claim it. That's true whether you're a retailer in the UK or a manufacturer in the US, which is exactly the conversation I've been having on the ground with American food businesses.
A few years ago, two colleagues and I spent two weeks travelling the US, talking to manufacturers, retailers, and foodservice operators about the industry challenges they were facing. The businesses we met were asking the same question in different words: how do we get "data ready" when so much of our supply chain sits outside our own systems?
After years of implementing this for customers, a handful of practices consistently separate the businesses that are prepared from the ones still exposed.
Not the two tiers you deal with directly, but who's behind them. Horsegate and cases like it happened in the gaps businesses didn't know existed.
I've seen the impact this has firsthand – one customer grew margin by six figures within three months of implementation; another opened a factory processing 200 new ingredients during Covid without adding headcount. Digitisation is what makes both possible, because it replaces guesswork with a record you can actually audit.
Every silo between a supplier and a retailer is a place fraud or contamination can hide undetected for longer than it should. The businesses that share data early tend to catch problems before they become recalls.
I hear this from customers constantly – certificates expiring unnoticed, pricing agreed over a phone call nobody wrote down, hours lost to admin that adds no value. Automated alerts and standardised templates fix this quietly but effectively; one customer cut admin time by 25% simply by removing the manual back-and-forth.
The businesses with the least exposure are the ones whose compliance teams spend their time fixing problems, not hunting for them. That only happens when the data is live.
AI and machine learning are starting to do for supply chain risk what horizon scanning used to do manually – spotting where fraud is most likely to be exploited before it happens. Manuka honey is a good example: global sales run at roughly ten times what New Zealand actually produces each year. That gap is a signal, and increasingly it's one software can flag automatically rather than one an auditor has to stumble onto.
But I'd caution against thinking technology alone solves this. The food industry is understandably cautious about change – the cost and disruption of digital transformation are real concerns, and I've sat across the table from plenty of teams who've been burned by projects that promised too much too fast. That's why the approach that actually works is a modular one: solving the highest-risk part of the supply chain first, proving the value, then expanding from there.
A more transparent, secure supply chain pays off well beyond compliance: less product pulled from shelves that didn't need to be, less waste, and fewer hours lost to manual checks that software can now handle in real time.
Supplier risk isn't a box to tick. It's the difference between a business that can prove what it says about its supply chain, and one that's hoping nobody asks. That's the standard we help our customers meet.
Want learn more about how to close the supplier risk gap? Kyle will be at IAFP 2026 in New Orleans from 26-29 July. Sign up for one of his 1-2-1 Supplier Compliance Workshops at the link below.