Case Study: Topco Associates accelerates GFSI compliance and eliminates paperwork with TraceGains

How Topco Accelerated GFSI Compliance and Eliminated Time Wasted on Paperwork

Topco Associates is a $14 billion, privately held cooperative serving more than 50 retail grocery and foodservice member-owners, with over 1,600 supplier manufacturing facilities, 30+ private‑label brands and 80,000 SKUs. The quality team struggled with manual supplier management, time-consuming allergen assessments (taking six to eight weeks), and keeping up with documentation needed to ensure suppliers met Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI)–benchmarked certification.

Topco implemented TraceGains’ Supplier Management and Specification Publishing to automate document collection, push specification updates, monitor allergens via dashboards, and generate supplier scorecards and alerts. The platform made Topco “365 Audit Ready,” cut time spent chasing audit documents by 10–15%, enabled instant spec publishing and automated expiry notifications, and helped increase GFSI-certified supplier facilities from 9% to 95%, while reducing buffer stock and freeing cash flow.

Topco Associates