Ask any food industry executive to cite his or her greatest concern, and the answer will almost always be the same: product safety. But the list doesn't stop there. Like any other business sector, food manufacturers are grappling with a number of challenges, many of them related to the age of the internet and social media.

As tainted-food scandals go, it wasn't so bad. The discovery early this year of unlabeled horse meat in European food products wasn't for the most part a safety issue. It was a violation of cultural norms, to be sure, as well as a truth-in-packaging problem. Most of all, it was a supply-chain failure.

Inventory is evil. Inventory is essential. The two statements aren't necessarily contradictory. Not if companies can figure out a way to determine the absolute minimum amount of stock needed to keep customers happy, while maintaining a tight lid on costs.

For retailers, the bar just keeps getting raised. Supply-chain excellence used to be about filling orders seasonally. Then weekly. Then daily. Now we hear of merchandise being replenished multiple times a day. Is there no end to the madness?

Companies say they are in dire need of competent supply and demand planners, but the requirements of that position today are so varied that you wonder whether a single person exists who can do the job. It calls for strong math and statistical skills, obviously, but a good planner must also be able to communicate well across the multiple "silos" of an organization. The right candidate will have a deep understanding of the requirements of manufacturing, logistics, marketing, sales and finance. Then there's the necessity of reaching outside company walls to suppliers and customers, to ensure that all parties are in agreement about what the demand forecast should be. Who are these freakishly talented individuals? And where can they be found?

Take a close look at any supply chain - even a single entity within it - and you're likely to uncover a hodgepodge of disciplines, each with its own method for forecasting demand, and each convinced of its superiority over everyone else's. So it only makes sense that companies would dream of coming up with a single forecast upon which all departments could agree.

It takes the giant Emma Maersk, which carries the equivalent of nearly 15,000 twenty-foot containers (TEUs), about three and a half miles to come to a dead stop. But there's no stopping the Triple-E, Maersk Line's even larger class of containership, from entering the liner trades over the next three years.

Judging from their actions, ocean carriers would love to toss out those irritating economics textbooks, with their tedious lessons about supply and demand. Too much capacity? No pricing discipline? Sluggish volume growth? Forget about it. Why should any of that prevent them from raising freight rates?

One could say that transportation faces multiple hurdles in the coming year, in the guise of new regulations and legislation that promise to have a serious impact on all modes. Me? I prefer to think of it as a minefield.

So collaborative purchasing appears feasible for the restaurant industry. But what about other business sectors? Can different companies - even direct competitors - really band together to get better deals from their suppliers?