Costco to Manage Global Food Supplier Safety Audits

Costco Wholesale, which manages thousands of suppliers worldwide, has adopted a new food safety software solution to help manage supplier food safety auditing and product quality testing data.

The membership club is working with Aspirago, whose applications include supplier food safety, product quality, auditing and certification management. Aspirago’s supply chain food safety software was built for the food safety industry and is the culmination of more than 10 years of in-field use with major retailers and food suppliers worldwide.

“Ensuring food safety and quality across the global supply chain is more complex than ever,” said Christine Summers, director of food safety and corporate quality assurance at Costco Wholesale. “Aspirago offers complete end-to-end functionality specifically designed for our needs as a global retailer to ensure our food safety expectations are met worldwide."

Aspirago helps retailers, manufacturers, standard owners and audit companies effectively manage product quality and food safety from suppliers worldwide by providing secure, collaborative Web-based software that aggregates and analyzes its third-party auditing and testing data. This includes multiple audit schemes and requirements consistent with Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) standards as well as customized retailer-specific audits.

“Currently, the Aspirago system manages more than 650,000 audits conducted by hundreds of auditors in more than 120 countries,” said Sireesha Mandava, director of Aspirago. “By providing an intuitive and robust global software solution, Aspirago assists companies in shifting their resources away from administrative tasks to focus on implementing proactive food safety measures that provide real brand protection. With preset analytics that are specifically built to monitor food safety and quality issues, global retailers can go beyond basic compliance to truly promote food safety and help reduce costly problems.”

Aspirago features include:

• Supplier compliance document management with alerts and reminders to keep documents up to date
• Smooth information flow between retailers, service providers and suppliers with end-to-end food and nonfood product quality management
• Closed-loop Corrective Action management ensuring problems are documented, addressed and resolved quickly
• Detailed audit, test and inspection results tracking with flexible checklists, scoring and grading criteria
• Detailed auditor competency and profile management to enforce auditor qualification requirements
• Information portals and communication tools that make it easy to inform suppliers and service providers of changes in policies or procedures
• Executive dashboards and a unique snapshot feature allowing users to find and compare critical information over time