WGCIT RESIDENT PROVISION ANALYTICS Reshaping Food Safety in Fresh Produce By Emily Lyons, Program Manager
Over the past two decades, the fresh produce industry has made significant strides in food safety and quality assurance. Central California’s grower-packers were among the first to embrace digital recordkeeping, often building their own tools or repurposing manufacturing software to meet audit requirements. These early efforts laid the groundwork for a more data-driven approach to compliance—but they also exposed the limitations of legacy systems. The Patchwork Problem Despite good intentions, digital recordkeeping in agriculture has faced persistent challenges. Connectivity dead zones make continuous data capture difficult. Systems must be configurable to accommodate overlapping programs like PrimusGFS and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) standards. Many lacked mobile readiness, leaving field teams reliant on paper or desktop- based solutions. The result was a patchwork of tools—functional, but fragmented. Audits remain a cornerstone of food safety and quality assurance, but they are inherently limited. They offer only a snapshot in time. Records are compiled for compliance’s sake, yet too often they’re shelved the day after the auditor leaves. This reactive approach misses a critical opportunity: using data not just to prove compliance, but to drive operational insight and improvement. The most significant advancement came just weeks ago at a live event in Austin, Texas: Provision Risk Scoring. This innovation uses live food safety and QA data to continuously measure an operation’s likelihood of non-conformance. Instead of waiting for the next audit or annual assessment, leaders can now track their risk like a credit score—daily, dynamically and with precision. “Audits can be a helpful a point-in-time snapshot. But they typically reflect operations on a good day, once a year — missing all the risks that evolve daily,” said Kevin Davies, Chief Research Officer. “Food safety and QA needs a new paradigm beyond the audit, with live feedback. When people understand the impact of their actions in real-time, they evolve faster,
improving performance. Provision Risk Scoring enables this shift, transforming food safety and QA records from a compliance burden to a source of insight for continuous improvement.” Provision Analytics: A New Paradigm Provision Analytics is redefining how the produce industry approaches food safety. Purpose-built for agriculture, Provision transforms compliance records into real-time visibility and actionable intelligence. Their analysis shows that a typical food safety system holds 11 times more data than a company’s ERP system. Every worker, process and product is tracked—providing a clear pulse of a grower-packer’s operations. Provision’s platform is designed for the realities of the field. It offers: • Configurability for complex and overlapping compliance programs • Mobility for field operations • Offline capability to enable a full day’s work without connectivity More importantly, Provision brings service, training and stewardship back into focus—meeting growers where they are, rather than forcing them to adapt to generic systems. Measurable Impact Among Provision’s clients, the results speak for themselves: • Frontline workers capture data 53 percent faster than with previous solutions • Managers prepare for audits 74 percent faster This efficiency frees up food safety teams to focus on impact, not paperwork. Provision’s output is intuitive and visual—color-coded charts that demystify the science of food safety. This creates a unified rhythm for managing activity from the field to the boardroom. Risks can be broken down by ranches, teams, programs and more, allowing supervisors to focus attention, boards to direct capital and frontline teams to align around shared priorities. A Culture of Continuous Improvement Tools like Provision Risk Scoring are driving measurable outcomes. They represent the evolution of food safety systems— from audit preparation to continuous improvement. For leaders in fresh produce, this shift is more than operational—it’s strategic. It strengthens both safety and performance, enabling growers and packers to protect their brands, their commodities and ultimately, the trust of consumers. With the right systems in place, the fresh produce industry can move beyond compliance and toward resilience. Provision Analytics is leading that charge.
44 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com November | December 2025
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