Member Article

Erudus updates development plan after inaugural steering committee meetings

Wholesalers and manufacturers have come together to help plot the path for how best to tackle the management of food allergen and nutritional information.

The foodservice professionals attended Erudus’ inaugural steering committee meetings, and the online provider of food product data has already started to act on the feedback and requests.

Handling allergen and nutritional data is one of the top hurdles for the industry, and it is hoped close collaboration amongst wholesalers, caterers and suppliers can ease the burden.

Jon Shayler, chief operating officer at Erudus, said: “The events went very well. We have collated all feedback and have begun reviewing internally, and the majority will end up on our development plan.

“A key message to our users was that this isn’t lip service and we do listen. We are able to back this up by illustrating that approximately 90 per cent of the changes implemented are actually generated by the people using Erudus.

“It’s vital that we develop the system based on what’s important to the users, and this covers functionality as well as its features. Our sole aim is to provide the industry with the best solution to dealing with allergen and nutritional product specifications.”

The steering committees are the latest move by Erudus to work closely with foodservice brands, with the company also launching a dedicated Slack channel, a cloud-based collaboration tool allowing free-flowing two-way communication.

Sarah Jones from Holdsworth Foods attended the committee meeting and welcomed the opportunity to contribute.

She said: “We took a lot from it. It was useful to hear what Erudus and wholesalers had to say, and we picked up some tips and were able to ask questions when we needed to, rather than someone just talking at you.”

Sarah added that handling allergen and nutritional data was a matter that was “getting bigger” for Holdsworth.

“Getting it into the system so people can draw from it is so important and it’s got to be accurate,” she said. “Erudus is invaluable for us in that sense.”

The next steering committee meetings are scheduled for 17 and 18 March 2020, and anyone interested in attending should contact Erudus. The venues will be based in the midlands, with all details confirmed in due course.

Jon added: “As part of our commitment to users, we will be exploring introducing smaller regional events to help improve accessibility.

“In addition, we will further enhance our education support, which will include launching an online training suite, how-to guides, and training videos. These will run alongside our current activity of starting and continuing conversations via media relations, social media, and face-to-face at events, trade shows, and exhibitions.”

Erudus has more than 90,000 manufacturers, caterers, and wholesalers using its software, which contains more than 60,000 products.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Sam Harris .