White Paper · 2026
The Inbox of Quality
What happens when the urgent always wins. Four quality leaders in food and beverage open their inboxes.
250 questionnaires a year. That is what one quality director we spoke with handles. And that is before counting the CoAs, spec sheets, certificates, and audit requests that land alongside them. He expects that number to grow. His team has not.
We build software for quality teams in food and beverage, which means we spend a lot of time talking to the people doing this work. Over the past two years we sat down with dozens of teams across Europe. We also spoke formally with four senior quality leaders across food manufacturing, fresh produce, food trading, and bakery. We asked them what the job actually looks like, where the time goes, and what needs to change.
What they described was not a workload problem.
THE PEOPLE WE SPOKE WITH
Anne Duijvestijn
QA and QC Manager, Menken Orlando
Olivier Galard
Group Quality, Sustainability and Health and Safety Director, Greenyard
Gern Huijberts
Global Quality Director, Interfood
Yvette Thewissen
QA Manager, Vandemoortele
Four people. The same inbox.
THE MISCONCEPTION
Quality is still fighting the wrong reputation
Ask someone outside food what a quality manager does and you will hear some version of the same answer. They check things. They enforce rules. They slow production down.
"Most people think we are just eating nuts all day. And professionally, the bigger misconception is that we are the police, checking if you are walking through a red light and adding another rule when you do. But we have an advisory role. A preventive role. QA holds a lot of knowledge about products and suppliers that others simply do not have."
Anne Duijvestijn
QA and QC Manager
"The biggest misconception is that quality is responsible for quality. It is not. Quality is made by everybody involved in the supply chain. The quality department manages the process. But the only department not actively involved in producing good quality is often quality itself."
Gern Huijberts
Global Quality Director
Different companies, different roles, the same story. The job is consistently underestimated by the people it serves.
THE REALITY
What the week actually looks like
Ask a quality manager what their week looks like and they will give you the official version. Audits. Corrective actions. Customer requirements. Management reviews.
Ask what it actually looks like and the answer is different.
HOW THE WEEK ACTUALLY BREAKS DOWN
30%
Pop-up
22%
18%
Meet
16%
Questions
14%
Planned work
Pop-up work — deviations, complaints, urgent requests not there Monday morning
Email and inbox — customer questionnaires, supplier follow-ups, corrective action threads
Meetings — internal reviews, cross-department alignment, audit prep
Colleague questions — people stopping by the desk, quick checks
Planned work — training, root cause closure, supplier development, prevention
Based on real accounts shared across the four interviews. During audit season, planned work shrinks further.
Her week breaks into fifths. Meetings. Email. Pop-up work that arrives Monday and owns Thursday. Colleagues at the desk. And somewhere in what is left, the planned work she actually came in to do. That is a normal week. Audit season is worse.
Anne Duijvestijn
QA and QC Manager, Menken Orlando
An ever-growing set of expectations landing on his team: regulatory changes, sustainability topics, customer requests. The challenge is absorbing the volume while making sure experts are not buried in work that does not need them.
Olivier Galard
Group Quality, Sustainability and H&S Director, Greenyard
A typical Tuesday: planned work, corrective action follow-up, customer requests, regulatory catch-up. Then the deviations arrive. A line stops. A shipment gets flagged. The planned work waits.
Gern Huijberts
Global Quality Director, Interfood
The time lost finding the right information when something goes wrong. Is this procedure current? Is that the right file? Her team spends more time searching for answers than writing them.
Yvette Thewissen
QA Manager, Van der Mortele
THE OBSERVATION
The inbox is full of the wrong work.
THE TRAP
Urgent always beats important
URGENT
Customer questionnaires
On-hold products blocking the line
Complaints from key accounts
New regulations in the inbox
Supplier non-conformities
IMPORTANT
Building a training culture
Closing root causes of recurring deviations
Developing suppliers to meet standards
Reviewing the HACCP plan properly
Prevention work that reduces future urgency
Every quality manager knows the difference. And every week, without exception, the urgent wins.
"I like to call it mopping the floor instead of closing the tap. We have complaints, on-hold products, issues on the production floor. And the pop-up work, that is a whole day, every day. We keep saying we need to do something about the root causes. And the next week we say the same thing."
Anne Duijvestijn
QA and QC Manager, Menken Orlando
The volume of customer requests, ESG reporting obligations, supplier audits, and regulatory requirements is growing faster than quality teams are. CSRD alone is expected to bring hundreds of new reporting obligations to food and beverage suppliers across Europe. Retail customers are asking more questions, in more formats, more often.
"We receive over 250 questionnaires a year. And with everything that is coming from CSRD and the way retail customers are asking more and more questions, in more formats, more often, that number is only going to grow. The team answering them has not grown with it."
Gern Huijberts
Global Quality Director, Interfood
WHAT WE KEEP NOTICING
Three patterns, across dozens of conversations
Beyond the four interviews, we have spent the past two years in conversations with quality, ESG, and compliance teams across food and beverage in Europe. Three things kept coming up:
The answer already exists. Nobody can find it.
Teams were not struggling to know what to answer. They were struggling to find where the answer lived. A policy in SharePoint. A previous response in someone's sent folder. A certificate in a shared drive that may or may not be current. A colleague's memory.
One quality manager described starting from zero every time, even when the question was identical to one answered three months earlier. The knowledge is there. The system to retrieve it is not.
Nobody knows what version of the company customers are seeing.
Different people answering the same customer questions with slightly different answers. No centralised record of what had been said before. No time to check.
Customers ask the same questions to multiple contacts at the same supplier. They notice when the answers do not match. Most quality teams have no visibility into whether they are consistent or not.
Customers are automating the sending. Suppliers are still answering manually.
A quality manager at a packaging company put it directly: if we do not adopt AI, we will end up with AI on the customer side generating and sending requests, and humans on our side answering them one by one.
The requests arrive faster than ever. The teams receiving them are the same size they were three years ago.
THE COST
What gets lost
The important work does not wait patiently. The HACCP review gets bumped once, then again, then it stops showing up on anyone's list. The supplier who keeps sending non-conforming materials gets another corrective action request instead of the real conversation that would fix it. The training programme sits in draft for a quarter, then two quarters, then it becomes next year's problem.
"We tend to reward the person who fixes an issue far more than the person who prevents one. The firefighter who puts out a fire is a hero. The clerk who put in the regulation that meant the fire never started is usually seen as a nuisance. But the effect of that second person is much larger."
Gern Huijberts
Global Quality Director
The financial cost is easier to calculate than the real one. A quality manager earning 60,000 euros a year who spends half their time on customer requests and repetitive work is spending 30,000 euros of salary on work a system could largely handle. For a team of three, that is 90,000 euros per year.
WHAT THE TIME COST LOOKS LIKE IN SALARY TERMS
1 person
€30K
per year in salary spent on customer requests and repetitive work
Team of 3
€90K
per year. Before slow response times and lost customers
At least 50% of the week on customer requests and repetitive work. Based on the week breakdown shown in the Reality section of this report.
These figures are illustrative. They use a 60,000 euro annual salary and a 50% time estimate based on the week breakdown shown in this report. A starting point for your own calculation, not a published benchmark."
The harder costs do not show up in a budget. A supplier relationship that frays because a compliance request took three weeks. A deal that stalls because documentation was requested on a Friday and arrived the following Wednesday. A compliance gap nobody caught because the team was too busy answering questions to read the new regulation properly.
"The challenge is not the knowledge or the expertise. It is making sure that experts are not spending their time on repetitive administration that does not bring added value. That is what keeps landing on my desk to solve."
Olivier Galard
Group Quality, Sustainability and Health and Safety Director
THE FUTURE
What the inbox should look like
We ended every conversation the same way. We asked each person to imagine opening their inbox in five or ten years. What do they hope is still there? And what do they hope is gone?
GONE OR NEARLY SO
Customer questionnaires filled out manually, every time, in a slightly different format
Excel files opened, cross-referenced, and re-entered somewhere else
Repetitive requests with no way to reuse what was already written
Certification dates tracked in a spreadsheet nobody fully trusts
STILL THERE BY DESIGN
Major deviations that need expert judgment, not just retrieval
Regulatory changes where the wrong call has real consequences
Supplier relationships that need a human conversation
The surprises. The situations no system anticipated.
From the closing question asked to all four leaders: "If we opened your inbox in five years, what do you hope is gone and what do you hope is still there?"
The goal is a different inbox. One where the repetitive work is handled, so the judgment, the relationships, and yes, the surprises, get the attention they deserve.
"With the same resources, we would just be able to do more because we do not spend time on the repetitive work that does not actually need us."
Olivier Galard
Group Quality, Sustainability and Health and Safety Director, Greenyard
HOW PASSIONFRUIT HELPS
From 250 questionnaires a year to half the time
One quality director we spoke with handles 250 customer requests a year, questionnaires, CoAs, spec sheets, audit forms. Each one manually means searching through documents, cross-checking past answers, re-entering the same information in a slightly different format. Hours per request, across a team that has not grown.
Passionfruit connects to your existing documents, policies, and past responses. When a questionnaire arrives, you select a question, ask Passionfruit in plain language, and it surfaces an answer with the source cited. If your team has answered that question before, it pulls from the Answer Library so the response is consistent with what was already said. You review, approve, and place it. Done.
No new portal. No switching systems. It works directly inside Excel, Word, and your browser.
Teams save on average 70% of the time currently spent on compliance admin. Faster responses also mean fewer deals held up waiting on quality documentation, and a stronger reputation with the customers who keep score.
See it in practice
If your team is starting from zero every time a customer request arrives, Passionfruit is built for exactly that.
ABOUT THIS REPORT
The Inbox of Quality is a series by Passionfruit. We spoke with four senior quality leaders across food manufacturing, fresh produce, food trading, and bakery in Europe, and drew on broader conversations with quality, ESG, and compliance teams conducted throughout 2025 and 2026. Named quotes have been lightly edited for clarity. Roles and company affiliations are described as held at the time of interview. Observations from broader conversations are presented anonymously.
