Former managers at Belgian legaltech scale-up Henchman are launching Backbone, an AI platform for real-time quality and compliance management in the food industry, with Seed funding from 100IN.
Backbone consolidates fragmented data, from supplier documents to lab results, giving quality managers the tools to detect risks before they reach production.
A recipe change at a food manufacturer triggers an immediate cascade of quality checks. Regulatory requirements around food safety have intensified sharply in recent years, and compliance now spans the entire organisation, from procurement and R&D to production and business development. Yet most of that oversight still runs on manual processes.
In practice, every supplier switch, product launch or incoming raw material delivery means manually cross-referencing certificates and specs, typically across Excel sheets, Word documents and email threads. Without real-time visibility, mismatches can go undetected until a product is already in production or worse, on the shelf.
Backbone's founders estimate that poor quality costs the food sector up to 15 per cent of revenue, excluding reputational damages.
The culprit is rarely a single critical failure, but an accumulation of small deviations caught too late. The recent wave of baby food incidents has put a sharp edge on what those numbers actually mean in practice. Backbone addresses the problem by centralising and automatically analysing data already within organisations, from supplier documentation and lab results to internal procedures.
"The data is usually already there, but scattered across systems or locked in people's heads," says co-founder Louis Opsomer.
"We make that information usable for day-to-day decisions."
"Many companies still operate reactively, treating certificates as their quality benchmark, but a certificate is just a snapshot," he adds.
“Backbone goes well beyond audit: rather than verifying compliance after the fact, it surfaces risks continuously. Besides, the time saved on administration frees quality managers to focus on what actually moves the needle.”
The platform is now operational across multiple production sites, and the team is handling inbound interest from both domestic and international prospects. Early customers include Zoutman, Greenway, Azingro and Euromeat.
The capital will fund commercial expansion and continued product development. Backbone is also establishing partnerships with international standards bodies, including BRCGS, and technology partners such as Microsoft, with integrations into Copilot among the initiatives under development.
"This is a global problem, and the inbound demand confirms that," says Siska Lannoo.
"The food industry is moving towards predictive systems that surface risks before they materialise. We are helping companies make that transition now. In AI, speed is a competitive advantage, but without deep domain expertise, you cannot build something that holds up at scale.
That combination is what Backbone brings to the table."
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