How safe is your food? That all depends on the meticulous care of the food processors working to manufacture and package the products that wind up on your plate every day. Amerisan USA is a company dedicated to helping the food processing industry—from Fortune 500 giants to medium-sized and small processors—reach its potential in safety and compliance with federal and international standards.
“What people are looking for is a resource to provide meticulous and excellent customer service,” says Silas Boyt, Quality Assurance Consultant for Amerisan USA. “We achieve this by leveraging our focus on providing clients with what they need: leading edge food safety solutions, innovative industry trends, best practices, which all result in compliance for the customer—which is key—and great value.”
From color coded buckets and dustpans to x-ray and metal detectable brushes and cable ties, Amerisan offers businesses the tools they need to make life easier for their employees and safer for the consumers they serve.
Pursuing food safety
Between easily accessible social media and continuous news cycles, food safety issues are at the forefront of public concern more than ever before. Food processors must be vigilant in protecting themselves against pathogens and other contaminants—a problem that reaches consumers and triggers a recall can be incredibly costly in more ways than one.
“Recall is the biggest dread of any processor,” says Boyt. “The average cost of a recall to a food company is about $10 million US dollars in direct costs, and then you have the additional damage to the brand and to loss in sales which is significantly higher. With such high risks, it’s imperative that operational mistakes are reduced to a minimum or eliminated through implementation of HACCP programs and GMP programs. Even 5S can play a great part in increasing food safety.”
While these programs are a processor’s most important line of defense, Amerisan is able to help enhance the safety routines of its clients with products and solutions designed to cut down on contamination.
“Using metal detectable items is one way to greatly reduce the risk of foreign particle contamination,” says Boyt. “It also validates to the consumer that the processor is taking into account due diligence in protecting the product and their brand for the consumer.”
Products like resin-set brooms and cleaning brushes are another line of defense against contamination. “We acquired one client that found some brush bristles in their products—they threw away eight tons of product, which is huge, and luckily they found it before it went out into market. Since then, they have only used our Resin Set Brushes,” Boyt recounts. “There are many steps that processors can take to protect themselves, and that’s where we are able to help them, bringing these new innovative products to market.”
Different ways of going green
When the goal is to kill as many pathogens and bacteria as possible, the priority for food processors is not whether a cleaning product is environmentally friendly—the priority is simply whether or not it’s the most powerful and effective cleaning product for the job. But a business like Amerisan does not have to give up on sustainability altogether.
“It is tough to make this industry go green, but we encourage it,” says Boyt, explaining that there are other ways to help their clients embrace more sustainable practices.
“With the technology and innovation we have today, we can help them reduce waste and reduce consumption,” Boyt continues. “We helped one client reduce consumption by 50 percent which made a substantial difference on its carbon footprint and its bottom line. So it’s not necessarily going green by having green products, but by actually tackling it in a different way and approaching it from outside the box to reduce waste—as opposed to just providing greener waste.”
The future of the industry and Amerisan
Food safety best practices and regulations continue to evolve at different rates around the world, and so are the wants and needs of processors working to meet more rigorous demands.
“People aren’t necessarily looking for the lowest item cost nowadays—they’re looking for the lowest cost of ownership, which takes everything into account from quality of the product through to its longevity,” says Boyt. “We’ve seen a shift in focus by the industry to see the real value of what they’re getting. The culture of our business is very customer service-led, in order to meet the deadlines and demands of the industry operates. The team is very dedicated, enthusiastic, and empowered to take care of our clients’ needs, providing great feats of exceptional customer experiences on a daily basis.”
Amerisan is there to help the industry comply with auditing bodies from the FDA to the SQF & BRC (British Retail Consortium) through a range of solutions. As demand grows, Amerisan has continued to grow between 20 and 50 percent year over year, expanding its national supply chain network to 14 strategic warehouse locations and its global reach through strategic partnerships in order to better serve as a trusted partner to the modern food processing industry.
“The world is becoming constantly smaller, with communications and travel improving,” says Boyt. As these changes continue, Amerisan is continuing its mission of making sure that world is a safer one as well.