Active ingredient

I understand bakery businesses make ideal clients for TraceGains – why?

Bakeries face tough cost pressures and complex supply chains. Many also require products that adhere closely to very precise specifications (granularity, moisture levels, etc.). TraceGains Supplier Compliance solution automates the intake of supplier documentation and compares it automatically to specifications, allowing bakeries to reduce time and error associated with lot-level compliance management, while also creating data insights to measure supplier performance, optimise operational flows and drive effective cost recovery.

What exactly is TraceGains and what does it offer?

TraceGains, the world’s only networked ingredients marketplace, connects the global consumer goods supply chain through its innovative TraceGains Gather platform. Enterprises and suppliers can easily collaborate to exchange critical information, data, and documents and work together to solve today’s unprecedented supply chain challenges. Information about ingredients and supply chain partners applies to a company’s unique supply chains using artificial intelligence and automation. Our patented PostOnce technology allows authorised stakeholders to share and receive vital information, precisely when, where, and how they need to operate efficiently and remain competitive.

What is digital specification management and how does it help companies?

Networked Specification Management lets companies capture, share and collaborate on both ingredient and finished good specifications. By digitising specification records, companies can manage versions and statuses, implement workflows and process controls and, crucially, manage associations between specifications, ingredients, formulas, and finished goods. Taken together, these features reduce the time and complexity associated with managing specifications across multiple products and supply chains, while simultaneously reducing error at every stage of the product life cycle, from ideation to manufacturing quality assurance.

Who is Gary Nowacki – what is his background and how, and why, did it lead him to found TraceGains?

Prior to TraceGains, Gary spent many years in enterprise software focused on the food and CPG industry. When he co-founded TraceGains over 15 years ago, he saw a tremendous amount of pain and frustration at the thousands of CPG companies trying to communicate critical information and collaborate on new product development, quality, safety, and regulations. All the existing software solutions focused on what went on within the four walls of a food company; the CPG industry was desperate for a solution that networked them all together, reducing great amounts of pain and making everyone’s life easier.

TraceGains offers “revolutionary solutions, at a much-needed time, that will change how the industry operates”. What does that mean for the food market and for which categories can you have the biggest impact?

The global food and beverage supply chain has traditionally been highly fragmented, with a complex global network of suppliers, manufacturers, service providers and brands all struggling to maintain compliance, quality and safety goals while managing multiple data formats, document types, and methods of information exchange. TraceGains brings it all together, standardising ingredient-level information via a single, comprehensive data standard and taxonomy. TraceGains connects, standardises and automates the ingredient data flow, bringing efficiency and accuracy to the supply chain while accelerating innovation.

Why do the EU and UK markets offer the best use case yet for TraceGains?

The EU and UK markets have been impacted heavily by changes in trade relationships such as Brexit and ongoing sanctions against the Russian Federation, as well as by supply chain disruptions stemming from the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. TraceGains offers important solutions to help brands diversify their supplier networks and create more flexible and resilient supply chains. In addition, TraceGains Regulatory Global data offering helps brands and suppliers navigate the global regulatory landscape and smooths new market entry for businesses needing to reach consumers in new geographies.

How can TraceGains help brands mitigate ingredient inflation?

TraceGains Marketplace offers access to ingredients and supporting data from around the world, helping brands locate new ingredient sources and optimise costs. In addition, TraceGains NPD suite offers solutions that help brands and manufacturers source new materials, reformulate products and develop specifications and recipes quickly, decreasing time to market for new formulations and enabling customers to pivot to lower-cost ingredients faster and more easily than ever before.

TraceGains offers configurable solutions for product development – how do these support customers in creating new formulas and finished goods?

Product development touches nearly every part of a customer’s organisation, from R&D to sourcing, quality, operations and regulatory. TraceGains enables seamless collaboration across teams, as well as with external partners, accelerating product development and reducing time to market for new products by as much as 75%.

Your solution offers ingredient agility. How important is ingredient data is key to help with the supply chain?

Ingredients in the food and beverage supply chain are always surrounded by important data. This ranges from ingredient attributes and specifications to supplier information, country of origin information, relevant regulation across jurisdictions, scientific citation data and more. TraceGains ties this information together, making relevant data actionable and available throughout the business. Rather than searching for data when an issue arises, TraceGains maps data to the ingredients within a customer’s supply chain and offers sophisticated alerting and watchlist technologies to push information to users when and where it’s needed.

Collaboration is key. Any examples of how you bring buyers and sellers together with co-manufacturing?

Co-manufacturing involves documents and data at various levels that can be difficult to keep straight. Partner and site-level information needs to pair with supplier information, which in turn needs to map to ingredient-level data, all of which needs to tie up to finished good specifications, packaging

information and much more. TraceGains lets customers track all of that information in one authoritative system, manage associations between connected documents and data, and streamlines the bundling of information for exchange and collaboration between partners throughout the manufacturing value chain.

What is required in terms of integration and what does it look like with TraceGains?

TraceGains can operate as a standalone system in many environments, but where appropriate, APIs are available for integration with other enterprise platforms such as ERP and PLM systems.

What is the future for TraceGains?

TraceGains is rapidly expanding across Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. to meet the complex and increasing demands of compliance and new product development solutions. TraceGains Gather, our latest innovation, creates a networked ingredients marketplace and unifying solution platform capable of ingesting global horizon scanning data, alerts and citations, then mapping it to an enterprise’s unique supply chain. Information becomes immediately accessible and contextual, dramatically reducing operating risks and the time required to compile information for development teams and audits.