How is TELUS food safety software different from other vendors?

TELUS food safety software is different from other vendors in the UK because TELUS is able to provide a more enhanced solution than a traditional software provider. We bridge the gap between complex IT systems and the practical language of BRCGS Issue 10, FSA and Retailer Codes of Practice. Unlike generic tools that often stop at the factory gate, TELUS offers a comprehensive ecosystem that connects the entire value chain – from global suppliers in Germany, Italy and beyond, directly to the factory floor. We close the manual links that typically create "Excel madness." Our platform is uniquely designed by food safety experts to think like an auditor, using passive evidence capture to build a robust audit trail as a byproduct of daily work, which eliminates the pre-audit scramble and ensures sites are future-proofed against the EFSA 2027 vision and the FSA's emerging digital-first enforcement models.

What is the TELUS ecosystem and how does it benefit my business?

The TELUS ecosystem connects the entire value chain. TELUS’s interconnectedness powers our green light concept – a fundamental shift in how materials are managed and integrated. Instead of reacting to issues upon delivery, the system enables materials validation before they even arrive onsite, putting an end to your business’s manual tracking and disparate spreadsheets. By automating these complex integrations, your business becomes the easiest supplier to buy from for major retailers. You aren't just providing a product – you’re providing the digital assurance and frictionless service that modern retail giants crave.

Will TELUS scale with my business as it grows?

Yes, TELUS software is designed to grow with your business. Whether you’re operating a single site or managing multiple facilities across regions, the platform supports increasing operational complexity without creating additional administrative strain. TELUS helps connect data across suppliers, systems and sites to provide greater visibility, consistency and control as your business expands. Our flexible workflows adapt to evolving retailer requirements, compliance frameworks and operational needs — helping your teams stay efficient, audit-ready and prepared for future regulatory change.

How does TELUS help protect my brand reputation?

TELUS software helps protect your brand reputation in several ways. It enhances your visibility to enable rapid end-to-end traceability , fast identification and isolation of contaminated products. This helps reduce food waste, mitigate risk through real time data and ensure regulatory compliance – protecting your brand reputation and building trust. TELUS’s interconnectedness powers our green light concept. Instead of reacting to issues upon delivery, the system enables materials validation before they even arrive onsite, putting an end to your business’s excel madness, manual tracking and disparate spreadsheets. By automating these complex integrations, your business becomes the easiest supplier to buy from for major retailers, boosting your reputation. You aren't just providing a product – you’re providing the digital assurance and frictionless service that modern retail giants crave.

How quickly can I expect to see ROI from TELUS?

The speed at which businesses see value will depend on their operational setup, existing processes and level of manual administration. However, many organisations begin seeing benefits shortly after implementation through improved visibility, streamlined workflows and reduced administrative burden. For example, based on industry benchmarks for administrative inefficiencies in manual food manufacturing environments, if a four-person technical team recovered approximately 2.4 hours of administrative time per person, per day through digital workflows, this could equate to nearly 200 hours of productive time regained per month. At the new UK wage rates, this savings may exceed the monthly cost of the system within 28 days. Beyond labour, TELUS protects your margins by enabling customers to set precise product specifications that directly reduce food waste and minimise product rejections at the factory gate or retail DC. This protects your bottom line and addresses the environmental and sustainability goals that are now a priority for the industry, turning waste reduction into a core operational value.

Where food safety meets strategy: the TELUS difference

Agriculture

Date posted 22 May 2026

A man using a tablet in a greenhouse, focusing on food safety management systems for agricultural practices.

Key takeaways

UK food businesses desperately need modern food safety software solutions to navigate the ever-changing regulatory and retailer requirements
Food safety software can help your business reduce costs by cutting down on admin work
Choosing the right solution is challenging, but the software provider you choose matters even more than the software itself
TELUS can deliver the software you need, tap your business into a valuable ecosystem that’s unmatched by other UK providers and future proof your business

Executive summary

The game has changed. Today, UK and European food businesses need top tier food safety software that is able to provide even more operational resilience. Your old tools can’t carry you through the digital shift that’s ripping its way through the industry. By adopting the right food safety software system now, your business can comply with the evolving digital expectations of the Food Standards Agency (FSA), European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and major retailers; protect its reputation; cut costs; and ensure financial stability.

In our previous blog in this series, we provided a framework for choosing the right solution for your needs. In this blog, we’ll examine why the software you choose is only part of the equation and why choosing the right provider is actually the most critical choice your business will make to protect your brand and bottom line. You’ll also learn how TELUS Agriculture & Consumer Goods can elevate and protect your business.

How can your business achieve operational resilience?

Your business is chugging along, but it needs to adopt top tier food safety software to meet the shifting demands of the modern UK and European landscape. Standard digital record keeping methods can’t keep up with the new demands your business will soon face, and if you stick with them your business will suffer.

Your old methods have become a liability

Sometimes you just have to say goodbye to what’s no longer serving you. If you’re using outdated tools and record keeping methods, your data won’t flow well between suppliers, internal departments and customers. Sticking with manual or disconnected systems is now a business liability and the recent National Living Wage uplift in the UK (£12.71) has made expanding your team to deal with the industry wide uptick in admin work impossible. Beyond the sharp rise in labour costs in the UK, European manufacturers are also facing inflationary pressures and rising labour costs across the Eurozone. The whole sector is struggling with a significant productivity crisis:

In the UK, the Food and Drink Federation (FDF) reports that up to 30% of manufacturers have been impacted by labour shortages which have resulted in production being paused or reduced
In Europe, manual admin work has become a burden for employees and a financial liability for businesses
Only 43% of European office workers surveyed by Ricoh spend most of their work day on tasks that deliver direct value.
26% say most of their time is consumed by admin work outside of their core job role.

So how can you weather the storm? To keep costs down and survive, you’ll need to keep your team lean, reduce your admin work volume wherever possible and decrease your team members’ time spent with the right software. You need to adopt a good digital solution now to ensure your future financial stability and recovery.

Admin overload

Your team is likely drowning in paperwork and data entry. New research from Ricoh Europe revealed:

28% of decision makers believe their employees spend most of the workday on admin tasks outside of their core job
26% of workers say they’re spending an average of 15 hours a week on admin tasks – nearly two days per week – like document management and manual processes
Only 43% of office workers say they spend most of their day on value-driving work
60% of decision makers and 44% of office workers have seen someone make or nearly make a serious mistake because of outdated or incorrect information caused by inefficient systems or processes in the last five years
62% of decision makers say their organisation has experienced or narrowly avoided a data or compliance breach due to mismanaged or missing documents

If your business can relate, you’re paying the price one way or another. Admin overload and mismanagement pulls your team members away from their real work and creates a reporting lag that forces your management team to make critical production decisions based on old or incomplete data, risking both margin and safety.

How can TELUS help?

The right partner makes all the difference. Food safety systems touch every part of your operation – that’s why who you partner with matters just as much as which software you choose. You need tools that will integrate seamlessly into your business paired with a reliable partner that has your back. Even if you pinpoint the best food safety software solution on the market, if it’s delivered by the wrong partner it may increase your admin work and reduce your overall efficiency. By working with a strategic partner like TELUS, you can actively identify and remove the invisible costs of manual admin work and fill your labour gap.

A system that works out the kinks

The system you choose needs to be just as strong as the provider. TELUS delivers a mobile-first operational system that replaces manual clipboards with real-time digital workflows. Unlike generic software, it enables your frontline staff to capture information instantly, eliminating the need for double-entry.

Turning efficiency into measurable value

You may be concerned about the cost of implementing a new system – but the hidden cost of manual processes is often far greater. Digital workflows help reduce time lost to paperwork, duplicate data entry and disconnected systems. By streamlining how information is captured and shared, TELUS Food Safety & Quality enables teams to operate more efficiently and make faster, more informed decisions.

Many food businesses find that improving operational efficiency allows them to better utilise existing teams, reduce unnecessary admin overhead and offset rising labour costs – helping the investment deliver value faster than expected.

For example, based on industry benchmarks for administrative waste in manual environments, if a four-person technical team recovered approximately 30% of its administrative workload through digital workflows, this could equate to nearly 200 hours of productive time regained per month. At current UK wage rates, the value of that recovered time may exceed the monthly cost of a digital system implementation within just 28 days.

Beyond labour, TELUS protects your margins. We enable customers to set precise product specifications that reduce food waste and minimise product rejections at the factory gate or retail DC. This protects your bottom line and addresses the environmental and sustainability goals that are now a priority for the industry – transforming waste reduction into a core operational value.

It’s time to level up

You deserve the best food safety software

Explore TELUS Food Safety and Quality

The technical bridge: expertise over IT

We speak your language. Technical managers need a partner who intimately understands BRCGS Issue 9, the FSA and Retailer Codes of Practice. TELUS provides technical guidance rather than just standard software support. Our systems are engineered by food safety experts to think like an auditor, ensuring every digital touchpoint is aligned with the EFSA 2027 vision and the rigorous demands of modern supply chains.

A stress-eating machine

No more scrambling. Many businesses endure high stress and disruption leading up to an inspection or audit. They work tirelessly to ensure their paper logs are legible, signed and organised – which diverts the attention of their technical team away from their primary responsibilities. TELUS’s technical expertise is embedded right in our software to enable passive evidence capture. A robust audit trail builds itself out of your team’s daily operations. This eliminates any pre-audit panic, giving your business quiet confidence that your data is always ready for inspection and your business is perpetually audit ready.

The unique value chain advantage

We enhance your view of the whole value chain. This is essential as there’s a growing demand for visibility upstream in the supply chain to support environmental reporting and food integrity. Cross-border movements now require more granular tracking to see where products come from and where they’re destined to go. As a result, many technical teams are wasting their valuable time on emails and spreadsheets, not to mention chasing suppliers for records, residue tests and harvest dates. They need to work hard to compensate for a deep lack of visibility that results in quality issues which are often only discovered when a product arrives at the facility, leading to rejections and waste. TELUS provides a digital infrastructure that links data from the start of the supply chain directly to the processing facility, ensuring a single source of truth for every product.

The power of the TELUS ecosystem

We have serious reach. When you partner with TELUS, your business taps into the broader TELUS ecosystem. TELUS software is used across the UK food industry — and across Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Belgium and Slovenia. Our partner businesses benefit from our unique network intelligence. Traditional tools often stop at the factory gate, but TELUS specialises in closing the manual link, bridging the critical gap across the entire value chain. We connect suppliers directly to the factory floor and ensure that data flows seamlessly from source to production, eliminating the typical data silos that obscure global supply chain visibility.

Nothing but green lights

No more roadblocks. TELUS’s interconnectedness powers our green light concept – a fundamental shift in how materials are managed and integrated. Instead of reacting to issues during delivery, the system enables materials validation before they even arrive onsite, putting an end to your business needing to scramble to find data, manual tracking and disparate spreadsheets. By automating these complex integrations, your business becomes the easiest supplier to buy from for major retailers. You aren't just providing a product – you’re providing digital assurance and frictionless service that modern retail giants crave.

Future-proofing: the digital-first FSA model

We’re planning ahead so you don’t have to. In 2026 in the UK and Europe, food safety is shifting from periodic oversight to continuous, digital-first enforcement. The FSA and EFSA are moving towards data-led supervision, where the ability to share high-fidelity, real-time compliance data is becoming a prerequisite for market access. TELUS is ready to help your business meet these new digital enforcement models and the EFSA 2027 vision. By aligning your data systems with these evolving regulatory expectations today, you’re being proactive and mitigating risk for your business tomorrow.

Stay ahead to get ahead

Partnering with us is an investment in your future. TELUS will help you stay ahead of the curve and ensure long-term site viability in a market where major retailers and regulators demand transparent assurance. TELUS’s platform is designed to meet rigorous data demands and protect your business from shifting standards. We transform compliance from a cost center into a competitive advantage, future-proofing your operations and helping your business become more resilient over time.

A commitment to the industry

Your success is our success. Your food safety software partnership goes far beyond simple software implementation – it’s an investment in your operations and future. In a market defined by razor-thin margins and relentless pressure, being able to pivot from tedious manual work to automated, intelligent oversight is key. By choosing a partner that deeply understands the technical and regulatory landscape, you’re moving away from legacy processes toward operational resilience.

When you partner with TELUS, your business is more than just digitised – it’s built to survive and thrive through the next decade of industry transformation. As retailer demands intensify and regulatory models become increasingly data-centric, having a foundation of technical authority becomes your most valuable asset. Partnering with TELUS provides peace of mind. The industry landscape may shift but your site will remain optimised, compliant and ready to lead in an era of digital-first food safety.

A strong partnership is all you need.

Talk to an expert

Frequently asked questions

TELUS food safety software is different from other vendors in the UK because TELUS is able to provide a more enhanced solution than a traditional software provider. We bridge the gap between complex IT systems and the practical language of BRCGS Issue 10, FSA and Retailer Codes of Practice. Unlike generic tools that often stop at the factory gate, TELUS offers a comprehensive ecosystem that connects the entire value chain – from global suppliers in Germany, Italy and beyond, directly to the factory floor. We close the manual links that typically create "Excel madness." Our platform is uniquely designed by food safety experts to think like an auditor, using passive evidence capture to build a robust audit trail as a byproduct of daily work, which eliminates the pre-audit scramble and ensures sites are future-proofed against the EFSA 2027 vision and the FSA's emerging digital-first enforcement models.
The TELUS ecosystem connects the entire value chain. TELUS’s interconnectedness powers our green light concept – a fundamental shift in how materials are managed and integrated. Instead of reacting to issues upon delivery, the system enables materials validation before they even arrive onsite, putting an end to your business’s manual tracking and disparate spreadsheets. By automating these complex integrations, your business becomes the easiest supplier to buy from for major retailers. You aren't just providing a product – you’re providing the digital assurance and frictionless service that modern retail giants crave.
TELUS can help future-proof your business against regulatory changes like the FSA’s new digital enforcement models and the EFSA 2027 vision. We help you stay ahead of the curve to ensure long-term site viability in a market where major retailers and regulators increasingly demand transparent assurance. Our platform is designed to meet rigorous data demands and protect your business from shifting standards.
Yes, TELUS software is designed to grow with your business. Whether you’re operating a single site or managing multiple facilities across regions, the platform supports increasing operational complexity without creating additional administrative strain.
TELUS helps connect data across suppliers, systems and sites to provide greater visibility, consistency and control as your business expands. Our flexible workflows adapt to evolving retailer requirements, compliance frameworks and operational needs — helping your teams stay efficient, audit-ready and prepared for future regulatory change.
TELUS software helps protect your brand reputation in several ways. It enhances your visibility to enable rapid end-to-end traceability, fast identification and isolation of contaminated products. This helps reduce food waste, mitigate risk through real time data and ensure regulatory compliance – protecting your brand reputation and building trust.
TELUS’s interconnectedness powers our green light concept. Instead of reacting to issues upon delivery, the system enables materials validation before they even arrive onsite, putting an end to your business’s excel madness, manual tracking and disparate spreadsheets. By automating these complex integrations, your business becomes the easiest supplier to buy from for major retailers, boosting your reputation. You aren't just providing a product – you’re providing the digital assurance and frictionless service that modern retail giants crave.
The speed at which businesses see value will depend on their operational setup, existing processes and level of manual administration. However, many organisations begin seeing benefits shortly after implementation through improved visibility, streamlined workflows and reduced administrative burden.
For example, based on industry benchmarks for administrative inefficiencies in manual food manufacturing environments, if a four-person technical team recovered approximately 2.4 hours of administrative time per person, per day through digital workflows, this could equate to nearly 200 hours of productive time regained per month. At the new UK wage rates, this savings may exceed the monthly cost of the system within 28 days.
Beyond labour, TELUS protects your margins by enabling customers to set precise product specifications that directly reduce food waste and minimise product rejections at the factory gate or retail DC. This protects your bottom line and addresses the environmental and sustainability goals that are now a priority for the industry, turning waste reduction into a core operational value.