The Grocery Manufacturers Association and Battelle Launch Tool to Protect Integrity of Food Supply Chain

With ingredients and food products supplied to food manufacturers and grocers across the globe, the integrity of the food supply chain is at risk. According to some estimates, food fraud costs the world economy $49 billion annually and about 10 percent of the food we buy is likely adulterated in some way.

The good news: the Grocery Manufacturers Association and Batelle—a world leader in scientific research and development—have partnered to provide a secure and intuitive web-based software tool called EMAlert that allows food manufacturers to rapidly analyze and understand their vulnerabilities during the manufacturing process.

“EMAlert works by providing quantitative estimates of an organization’s vulnerability to EMA for each commodity included in the analysis based on a combination of characteristic attributes and subject matter expert-based weightings”, said Ashley Kubatko, principal research scientist at Battelle. “The approach focuses on predicting fraudulent tendencies similar to approaches used by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to predict terrorist tendencies and preferences.”