How factory innovation brings benefits to the farm

Retail Ready Operations Australia (Coles RROA) and Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA) recently partnered in a Co-innovation program to create supply chain efficiencies through a range of innovative products, packaging and operating processes.

The MLA Co-innovation program aims to enable leading Australian red meat value chains to fast-track innovation and growth strategies.

Coles RROA explored 89 initiatives through the program – all aiming to deliver benefits across operational excellence, product innovation, digital solutions and sustainability.

Coles RROA Senior Project Manager Suvir Salins said the program allowed the business to focus on improvements they would not have normally explored.

“We did many proof-of-concepts to develop an idea which we could then sell to the business as a viable investment once progress had been made,” Suvir said.

“Several of those proof-of-concepts ended up as major projects which have come to total fruition and delivered a lot of benefits to the business,” he said.

Efficiencies bring more sales

Several innovations were developed through the project that could be adopted by other retailers or further along the supply chain. Examples include packaging improvements, AI-operated vision systems, digital dashboards and export labels.

“Our industry partners had similar challenges when it came to improving shelf-life, reducing product transport and increasing product efficiency. Where we found improvements, we were able to share them with industry partners and detail how they could access these improvements for themselves,” Suvir said.

Coles RROA Enterprise Planning Manager Jordan McIntyre said efficiencies built within the program should translate to producers through better systems and increased red meat sales.

“A large amount of what we’re trying to innovate will reduce costs and improve quality and freshness. With all the work going into producing red meat, we need to make sure we have an efficient value chain to deliver fresh products in a consumer-ready form,” Jordan said.

“With efficiencies gained and money saved, this has enabled investment in price or in marketing those products.”

Coles saw a 180-tonne increase of red meat sales over the three-year program (2021–2024), equalling a massive 26% rise.

Learning through networks

The results were clearly successful, but Suvir said many unintended additional benefits were discovered throughout the program.

“Having such a wide industry network has offered more benefits than we anticipated, allowing us to identify solutions to problems we hadn’t considered before and find other ways to leverage existing technology,” Suvir said.

“We have the capability to run these projects and this program has allowed us to dedicate real efforts towards innovation and capability-building.

“Now, Coles is in a unique position to translate those benefits from our plant all the way through the supply chain.”