Barilla perfects product development governance, streamlining formulation and nutritional labeling with Trace One Devex PLM

Customer Profile 

Established in 1877, Barilla is an Italian family-owned food company present in more than 100 countries. According to Forbes, Barilla is the largest pasta company in the world with an estimated $4 billion in annual revenue. Barilla also leads in the ready–to–use sauces market in continental Europe, bakery products in Italy, crispbread in Scandinavia, and is recognized worldwide as a symbol of Italian know-how.

Situation:

Standardizing and streamlining product development, maintaining a single controlled data repository to leverage and reuse existing knowledge

With the increasing demand to be agile, meeting fast-changing customer needs and formulate the right products, recipe development and nutritional labeling processes are becoming critical optimization points. Committed to continuous improvement, Barilla Group sought a way to streamline recipe development, manage nutrition labeling, and maintain compliance with regulatory requirements.

Challenge:

• Employees spread across 12 countries on 4 continents

• Manual work with spreadsheets for many recipe development steps

• Need to standardize product development process

• Need to optimize nutrition labeling regulations navigation and create compliant nutritional labels faster

• Ensure product compliance with regulations from different markets

• Need to meet requirements from authorities, customers, and internal marketing strategy

Solution:

End-to-end support for the product development process 

After researching and testing several solutions, Barilla Group identified Trace One Devex PLM as meeting all outlined business requirements, and so it decided to move forward with Trace One.

Innovation Strategy

• 2010 – Trace One Devex PLM Implementation. Product Development, Regulatory and Labeling tools.

• 2019 – The system has been upgraded to the Trace One Devex PLM 3.7 version to take advantage of the extended solution functionality and enhanced and more intuitive user experience.

Solution scope:

• Streamline research and development, procurement, and regulatory affairs workflows to optimize the new product development process and accelerate time to market.

• Automation and optimization of recipe development, nutritional labeling, ingredients list, and allergens declaration:

  • Build an extension of the current raw materials database, containing all nutritional values, legal denominations, and allergens information.

  • A recipe simulation tool to support the product development process.

  • Calculation of nutritional values and a generation of ingredient and allergens list, according to specific country rules.

  • Centralize and structure specifications and product information in a consistent way to share key information and speed up the product launch.

• Worldwide deployment

Outcomes:

Flexibility and solid governance of product development as key benefits

• Quick adaptation to consumer needs. To meet rising demand among consumers for healthier food, Barilla has used Trace One Devex PLM to reformulate over 420 sauce, pasta and bakery recipes, which now contain less sugar, saturated fats, and salt.

• Efficient collaboration and data consistency: a single tool for formula experiments, trials, recipe development, and labeling for all Barilla’s products.

• Ensured multi-country specific compliance. Reduced time of creation and finalization of nutrition labels with automated calculation of nutritional values and generation of ingredient and allergens list according to specific country rules. 

👉 Interested in learning more?