When we buy food, we do not consider whether it is safe or not, we take it for granted. For this to happen, in the food industries we work constantly to improve the food safety of every product that comes out of our facilities every day.
At Sant Dalmai SAU, the answer is yes, of course! The founders of the company were pioneers in the recruitment of technical staff, and in the late 60s the quality and food safety department was created. Today, a multidisciplinary team ensures the safety of our products by carrying out tasks as diverse as: cleaning checks, application of good manufacturing practices, or monitoring the critical points of production control, among others.
When we analyze available data on food poisoning reported in Europe, we realize that in general the cases detected have increased compared to previous years. This leads us to the question; are we doing it worse today than we were yesterday? Definitely NOT! But we have better technology, more qualified staff and enough resources to find and detect more. Obviously, only what is measured can be quantified. Moreover, communication and notification systems have evolved and work much more efficiently. That is why we can answer an emphatic Yes to the question: we have improved on the ability to detect and implement new checks that enable us to market safer products.
At Sant Dalmai more than 20 years ago we implemented a computerized traceability system that gathers data from all the production process, from the entrance of raw material up to the shipment of final goods. These checks enabled us to start seeing in real time what was happening in the production plant. Today we start talking about Quality 4.0, which means having all quality controls computerized, processing them with programs that let us extract data, work with all the history of results obtained, and predict future deviations that will be prevented by applying suitable corrective measures.
With more than 25,000 microbiological parameters analyzed annually, about 1,500 surfaces verified and more than 150,000 check points analyzed, the goal of our technicians is to anticipate as much as possible probable process deviations. With the help of computer systems the data is transferred directly to our software, and thus we obtain a global vision that enables us to prevent incidents, know what will happen at the production line and predict how a product can evolve in different situations that can occur throughout the day.
The flexibility of our production plant makes it easy for us to adapt to the specifications of each customer, and send them via computer networks to the different production lines to prevent compliance errors.
We analyze, evaluate and manage quality controls, eliminating those that do not add value, promoting those that do, and incorporating new checks and new analyzes when we consider it convenient. Having the industry connected and taking this step towards quality 4.0 allows us to claim that every day we offer our customers products that are safer than yesterday, but less than tomorrow.
