Issues in Food Industry

Food industry is a fundamental in civilization as food is crucial in daily life. Its pivotal in public health, food safety and security, nutrition majorly in social development. Challenges are an important component as its purposely for growth. Issues and challenges mainly examine by surrounding circumstances. Consumers demands towards the industry are expanding towards healthy and environmentally-driven food and drinks classification. The plant-based, allergen/intolerance-friendly, organics is a trend currently. In 2005, the consumer awareness towards environment originates the intrigues towards organic foods (Peattie & Crane, 2005). Natural and organic products are rising in this modern era as following the food trends.

Food industry challenge principally is law and regulation. In government sectors, they are more specifiedwhich precipitate food manufacturer and businesses face difficulties in production process following the updates as demands decided by government. As known, new production consumes more time to enter the market as the marketing and testing to retails required most of time. Furthermore, labour cost in food industry is increasing which challenged the business profitability. As the labour cost arising, the machineries productivity needs to be maximized and business sales needs to be increase in order to gain the profitability whilst conserve product quality and compliant. Besides, the labour shortage in food industry is also increasing “Vacant positions substitution difficulties defines as labour shortage (Food Manufacturing Business, March 2022).

Universally, food security existed with physical and economic access to ensure the safety and nutritious. Also, the purpose of it is to fulfil dietary needs and preferences in healthy lifestyle (World Food Summit,1996). The challenges faced requires dealing abilities with food shortage rise as the world population is also increasing. As following consumer demands, food businesses strictly focused on the food trends,dietary requirements, natural resources as it can affects the supply chains. Products and processes applied specified characteristics to influence the quality and assurance in production (Ziggers and Trienekens, 1999; Vorst vander, 2000).

Alongside, food safety failures lead to bad publicity and customer loyalty towards the brand product. Other than that, most product recalls issues been reported with incomplete labels and errors such as unmentioned allergens in labels which foresee from government law and regulation.Subsequently, the food waste issues in the industry needs elucidation among the industry businesses and governments. Gigantic solid food waste been dumped in landfills whilst the liquids been released into rivers and oceans untreated (Wang, 2014) which leads to pollutions. In all consumer ends, the food waste cost is higher in supply chains which also where most food waste occurred (Gunders,2012: Maggio et al.,2015). 

 

Lastly, one of major challenge in food and beverage industry is e-commerce pervasive presence. In 2021, consumers strive information from digital platform thus raised their expectation towards the particular brand. During pandemic era, food businesses were unprepared, slower on the uptake of it. Food manufacturers were grapple compared to online retailers such as Amazon as they invested towards grocery e-commerce earlier. Now days, manufacturers discovering methods in increasing products value to deliver ideal products quality in e – commerce markets.