14 NOVEMBER 2024: A pilot project we have undertaken with CSIRO and the DAFF could see savings amounting to $900m/year across Australian’s red meat industry.
A team of digital scientists, led by CSIRO’s Dr Bob Barlow, connected data sets we shared from our meat chilling operations and found savings worth $60m/year for our Cannon Hill site.
Dr Barlow explained: “ACC’s spray-chilling process helps control carcases from shrinking during chilling. This is a challenge many beef processes need to manage, as the weight of a carcase is a major part of its market value.
“In our pilot, connecting the data revealed a small percentage difference in the overnight carcase weight loss, depending on their location in the chillers.
“That information has led them to go and find out why particular pockets in chillers might be having greater moisture loss and therefore weight loss than others,” he said.
“We’ve done some preliminary calculations and if we can solve that one problem, there’s potentially a $5 to $7m saving per chiller per year, at that one plant. ACC has 12 chillers and the potential to save $60m.
“We believe weight-loss disparity in chillers is a common issue across the industry – let’s extrapolate it and say there are 15 similar scenarios at processing plants around Australia,” he said. “By solving that one issue, there could be savings of $900m a year for the industry.”
“It’s a prime example of how continuous data analysis – on top of the essential food safety compliance – can deliver huge value to the food processing industry’s bottom line,” Dr Barlow said.
ACC helped the team connect the immense amount of data collected across our supply chain. We shared with them how we generate and collect compliance data – whether manually or via sensors – producing a machine-readable data stream.
Dr Barlow said: “We connected up these disparate data streams and played that back to ACC to reveal the opportunities for efficiency improvements.”
The digital ecosystem was highlighted as part of the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry’s launch of the National Agricultural Traceability Strategy: Implementation Plan 2023 to 2028 yesterday at the Health and Food Sciences Precinct at Coopers Plains.
Our R&D manager Paul Gibson was among the group at the launch.
The purpose of the pilot is to make quality and other trade verifications straightforward. The scientists are developing a digital method that organises data and specific modules to manage and assess risks at critical points.
Dr Barlow said: “Each day, processing plants, producers and others across supply chains produce an enormous amount of data to satisfy a point-in-time assessment for their compliance program.
“Most of the time, that data is only revisited when a regulatory auditor comes asking to check it. A continuous assurance system turns the same information into a real-time digital ecosystem.
“With this new digitised system data only needs to be captured or reported once. Required reporting activities move from static records to continuous, free-flowing information.
“We’re starting with food safety compliance but down the track the system will bring in aspects of quality, biosecurity, sustainability, and other credentials that are important in global trade.
“It also empowers food producers and processors to do audits on the fly and understand how they’re performing across a number of metrics.”
The project received funding from the Australian Government’s National Agriculture Traceability Grants Program, as well as Meat & Livestock Australia.
