WASTE MANAGEMENT IN ACTION – TRACEABILITY
Proactive, rather than reactive COOKERS’ MISSION OF PROVIDING SUSTAINABLE AND ENVIRONMENTALLYFRIENDLY OPERATIONS IS BEING ASSISTED GREATLY THROUGH THE COMPANY’S TRACEABILITY COMPONENT.
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elf-labelled as “Australia’s most sustainable oil”, bulk oil suppliers Cookers has set a high internal standard for minimising its environmental impact. Delivering products across all major cities, metro areas and select regional areas nationwide, Cookers has established a unique traceability system by which the company can watch what is coming and going out with each drop of oil. Hari Srinivas, Cookers National Quality and Safety Manager, says developing the company’s traceability capabilities has opened the door to a new level of quality assurance and control. “Traceability is very important, especially when you are in a business that works within the food industry,” Hari says. “Basically, every drop
that comes in, we can trace it back to the supplier.” Hari says traceability is an essential aspect of quality assurance. With batches of oil being sent nationwide, having a regulatory system greatly diminishes the chance of a re-call required for a particular product. “Without being able to trace a product back to the supplier, in the unlikely event of a product defect, I cannot know where the issue first arises or how similar issues can be prevented in the future,” he says. “For example, if 1000 deliveries of the same batch have been sent out and there is only one customer affected, then that issue is likely circumstantial. But if there are 100 reports of a bad batch then that is a serious issue which then needs to be resolved.”
Traceability also plays a large role in Cookers’ drive to be sustainable. The company can trace back oil products to see how an incident occurred. “If there is an environmental issue we can go back and trace the origins of the problem, such as what is going into the drain, to work out what happened on any particular site,” Hari says. This extends to Cookers’ own procedures during the refining and processing stages of used cooking oils from customer supply tanks. “Everything goes through thorough food safety quality checks before going as fresh oil,” Hari says. “When the used cooking oil comes back to us, we are able to trace the effectiveness of our own processes. This includes how much electricity we are using as well as natural gas to process that used cooking oil to refine the product into animal feed or biofuel. By tracing those aspects, we are calculating Green House Gas (GHG) emissions and it’s impact on the environment.” Randomised mock-recalls also ensure that quality is maintained
Cookers’ traceability capabilities ensure that product quality is maintained. 38 / WMR / November 2021
