From burden to solutions: How food manufacturers are winning the food safety fight

Every year on June 7, the world pauses to recognise World Food Safety Day, an occasion established by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to focus global attention on one of public health's most persistent, and most preventable, challenges.

This year's theme, “From burden to solutions: Safe food everywhere,” puts data at the centre of the conversation. The message from WHO and FAO is clear: We have better evidence than ever about where foodborne diseases strike, how they spread, and what prevents them. The challenge now is turning that evidence into action at every level of the food system.

For food manufacturers, that challenge isn't abstract. It plays out on the production floor, in the quality lab, across the supply chain, and in every batch that leaves the facility.

The scale of the problem

Unsafe food causes more than 600 million cases of foodborne illness every year. The impact reaches far beyond individual health. It disrupts livelihoods, strains healthcare systems, and creates significant economic costs for producers and governments alike.

The encouraging truth embedded in this year's theme is that the vast majority of these illnesses are preventable. Better data, stronger monitoring, and coordinated action across the food system can dramatically reduce this burden. But prevention has to be built into processes, systems, and the technology manufacturers rely on every day.

Where technology meets food safety

At Infor™, we work with food and beverage manufacturers around the world who treat food safety not as a compliance checkbox, but as a core operational commitment. What we've seen, consistently, is that the manufacturers who perform best on food safety outcomes are the ones who've built data visibility and process control into the fabric of how they operate.

Here's what that looks like in practise:

End-to-end traceability from ingredient to consumer

When something goes wrong, speed matters. The ability to trace a product from origin to shelf, and to isolate an issue before it reaches consumers, is one of the most powerful tools in a food manufacturer's safety arsenal. Infor CloudSuite™ Food & Beverage provides full traceability through Infor Graphical Lot Tracker, across inbound ingredients, production batches, and outbound distribution. What used to take days through a mix of frantic emails and phone calls can be accomplished in minutes.

Quality management built into production, not bolted on

Reactive quality management, catching problems after they've occurred, is no longer sufficient. The manufacturers leading on food safety are building quality control checkpoints directly into their production workflows, with automated alerts, in-process testing records, and exception management that flags deviations in real time. Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage supports this with integrated quality management that keeps safety embedded at every stage of production in real time, across enterprise software from enterprise resource planning (ERP) to manufacturing execution systems (MES).

Compliance readiness as a daily discipline, not an annual scramble

Global food safety standards such as the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP), Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), and others, require manufacturers to demonstrate consistent, documented control of their processes. Infor's food and beverage specific ERP capabilities help manufacturers maintain audit-ready records continuously, reducing the burden of compliance and the risk of findings that point to gaps in control.

Cybersecurity as a food safety imperative

Food safety risks don't only originate on the production floor. As food manufacturers have become increasingly connected, with ERP systems, internet of things (IoT) sensors, automated production lines, and supplier networks all exchanging data in real time, they have also become targets. Bad actors who compromise operational technology can manipulate production parameters, corrupt quality records, disrupt traceability data, or halt operations entirely. Any of these outcomes creates a direct risk to the integrity of the food supply.

Protecting food safety today means protecting the systems that underpin it. Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage is built on the Infor Industry Cloud Platform, a secure, cloud-native architecture with enterprise-grade access controls, audit logging, and data integrity safeguards, ensuring that the operational and compliance data manufacturers depend on remains trustworthy, tamper-resistant, and continuously available. In a threat landscape that is growing more sophisticated every year, cybersecurity isn't a separate information technology (IT) concern. It's a food safety concern.

Yield optimisation: Where efficiency and safety converge

Food safety and operational efficiency are sometimes treated as competing priorities. The reality is that they reinforce each other, and yield optimisation is one of the clearest examples of that relationship.

When manufacturers have precise control over raw material usage, batch composition, and production parameters, two things happen simultaneously: Waste goes down and product consistency goes up. Less waste means fewer situations where ingredients approach or exceed safe use-by windows, where borderline-quality inputs get pushed through to avoid write-offs, or where spoilage creates contamination risk in the production environment. At the same time, tighter process control produces more uniform output, with less batch-to-batch variation, fewer deviations from specification, and a lower likelihood that a product leaves the facility outside of its intended safety and quality parameters. Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage's artificial intelligence (AI)-driven yield optimisation capabilities give manufacturers the visibility and control to achieve both outcomes. It's a capability that delivers on the bottom line and quietly, consistently, raises the food safety floor at the same time.

Data that drives decisions, not just reports

The World Food Safety Day 2026 theme is fundamentally about the power of data to guide action. For food manufacturers, that means moving beyond static reports toward real-time operational intelligence with dashboards that surface trends, AI-assisted insights that flag risk before it becomes an incident, and connected systems that give decision-makers a complete picture across the supply chain.

The bigger picture

World Food Safety Day is a reminder that food safety isn't the responsibility of any single actor. It runs from farm to table, from field to retail shelf, from policy to production floor. Manufacturers sit at a critical point in that chain and the systems they use have a direct bearing on outcomes that affect people's lives.

Infor is proud to support World Food Safety Day 2026 and the important work of WHO and FAO in driving global progress on this issue. We believe that technology, applied thoughtfully, is one of the most powerful tools available to the food industry in turning the burden of foodborne disease into something the world can genuinely solve.

Safe food everywhere isn't a slogan. For the manufacturers we work with, it's the standard they hold themselves to every day.

Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage helps manufacturers strengthen food safety across operations through traceability, quality management, compliance, and real-time visibility. Explore our food and beverage solutions or speak with one of our industry experts.