April 30, 2019
Williamsville, NY, April 30, 2019—Ashton Potter, a leading provider of high security printing and advanced technology for the world’s governments and manufacturers, optimized its ProLinc™ technology solution for high-precision recall management dedicated to the regulated food and beverage space. Ashton Potter’s enhanced solution provides a timely response to the ongoing recall epidemic, which continues to shake the bedrock of consumer confidence in food and beverage safety. As a product security leader that has been providing trusted solutions to the public sector for more than a century, Ashton Potter is uniquely qualified to deliver food and beverage customers a solution with the security and scalability needed to address this critical and widespread issue.
The enhanced SaaS-based ProLinc™ offering applies individualized, serialized identities to every ingredient and food item at any point in the value chain, beginning in the field and extending to the end consumer. The solution then stores these insights in a centralized, Blockchain-enabled database to maximize data scalability, security, and accessibility for key stakeholders. Through a foundation of complete, cross-lifecycle traceability, ProLinc™ enables food and beverage manufacturers to proactively mitigate recalls before they occur by identifying anomalous practices in harvesting, processing, manufacturing, and distribution.
ProLinc™ also enhances the ease of recall management by providing the backward and forward forensic data needed to rapidly identify and eliminate affected product. In the event the FDA announces a food recall, stakeholders can simply scan product to unlock highly-detailed insights into an item’s genealogy, including the field in which ingredients were grown, the factory in which they were processed, the store in which they were sold, and a host of additional contextual details. Contaminated food items can be isolated in real time, minimizing the often-lengthy process of resolving a food recall and eliminating billions of pounds of food waste due to the inability to pinpoint the source of contamination.
“When a food recall is issued, investigatory agencies immediately seek out the point of compromise,” said Kelly M. Smith, Senior Vice President of Ashton Potter. “Even when accurate data is available, food and beverage companies are often unable to isolate with certainty which items passed through contaminated zones—or if other products later passed down the same production lines and are also at risk. ProLinc™ offers greater transparency into the food and beverage supply chain, instilling consumers with new confidence and brands with new visibility to protect their customers, image, and bottom line.”
In addition, the update introduces modules to help food and beverage providers address regulatory requirements and tax obligations that are levied based on location or item. ProLinc™ can now meticulously document growing and manufacturing practices and tax fulfillment efforts, and provide on-demand access to complete, verifiable records. This enables food and beverage companies to cooperate with the FDA and other government agencies without interrupting operational output—all while automating documentation processes that were previously complex and time consuming.
“For food and beverage manufacturers, the rapid pace of production often results in vague records that meet only the minimum required standard,” said Joe Schutte, Chief Technology Officer at Ashton Potter. “With ProLinc™, compliance management becomes an automated aspect of production without adding any additional operational burden. That means if government agencies ever come knocking, organizations are prepared to serve up real-time insights—shortening the length of FDA investigations and substantially reducing any negative operational impact.”
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About Ashton Potter
For nearly a century, Ashton Potter has possessed a unique understanding of the complex product security challenges governments and businesses face, and a heightened commitment to solving them through high security printing and technology. Today, Ashton Potter delivers complete product security solutions that span the physical and digital worlds. By pairing advanced high security printing capabilities with ProLinc™, a premier SaaS-based solution that serializes, tracks, and authenticates products throughout the supply chain, Ashton Potter enables customers across sectors to achieve universal security, authenticity, and integrity on a global scale.