Food safety systems: prevent rather than cure
Elsevier Food International Vol.8, No.4, November 2005
Vincent Hentzepeter
Product recalls are a fact of life and are likely to continue to bother us in the future. Their frequency and extent can, however, be reduced if food producers and retailers act together and stop passing the buck to other parties in the chain. This is not about even more and even tougher regulations, but drawing food safety elements together in a proactive scheme of risk management.
A more effective approach to tackle food hazards at the source is a major challenge. More transparency throughout the food chain is a precondition to identify risks and nip hazards in the bud. Better and faster communication lines are vital in this respect, particularly when it comes to sharing data on product history or easy access for both large and small companies to relevant information about potential hazards. Today the food sector is far from transparent. Due to fraud, incidents, misinformation, lack of alertness and too many companies that shirk their responsibility, food hazards get the chance to slip through the detection system. Major food scandals in the last few years testify to this.
Worrying fact
In an ideal supply chain, food safety certificates, track records and laboratory reports guarantee safe use of ingredients and food products during successive steps of industrial processing. The reality is, however, more complicated. Even common food safety hazards, such as salmonella and campylobacter bacteria on poultry are hard to manage. A hundred per cent food safety is an illusion when it comes to poultry. A positive fact is that progress has been made in the exclusion of contaminated batches before distribution to the supermarket. Thanks to standard microbiological screening methods, fewer contaminated poultry products enter the stores. Nevertheless, spot checks in supermarkets show high contamination rates on chicken and turkey. Up to tens of per cents of products, like chicken breast fillets, test positive on salmonella and campylobacter. Mostly minor infections, but a worrying fact is that severe outbreaks still occur despite all food safety efforts in the chain. This raises the following question: if poultry-borne bacteria, such as salmonella and campylobacter that are well documented and understood, defy our food safety system, what about threats from unexpected origins? These may have a massive impact, as for instance the dioxin crisis in 1999 showed. Highly toxic compounds could pass unnoticed through the food chain, because they had never been identified as a risk. At a certain moment, when chickens fell dead from their roost, authorities woke up.
Growth hormone
This was not the last lesson the sector learned. In the summer of 2002, lack of information on crucial details again played tricks on the food safety system. This time a large batch of low-cost sugar, containing a contraceptive, got on the market. What had happened? Sugar from the runoff water of an Irish pharmaceutical plant had been illegally reprocessed into glucose syrup. This bulk ingredient was sold as a cheap ingredient to food mills and private label manufacturers. As a consequence, the growth hormone MPA managed to travel from a wastewater plant of a drug company into pig feed and soft drinks. MPA was finally found in the renal fat of pigs during a standard test procedure. Europe’s pork market suffered its next food crisis and the beverage sector had a tough time.
Biggest British recall
Suppose the GFL (General Food Law, introduced in January 2005) had been put in place before these crises. Would authorities have reacted faster on the presence of dioxin in chicken or MPA in pig feed and soft drinks? Probably not. The GFL regulates that ingredients can be traced back to their origin but it is not an early warning system. The GFL aims at controlling food safety procedures in the food sector. According to the regulation, each party in the chain has to make sure that that food safety standards are met by their suppliers. However, the GFL cannot put a halt to fraud or prevent restocking of products that have already been recalled. This is exactly what went wrong in what is believed to be the biggest recall of grocery products in the British history. During this year’s food crisis, retailers, food processors and ingredients manufacturers in the UK acted in compliance with the law. Still, they failed to guarantee a safe and fit food for the consumers. Exactly 580 items had to be removed from the shelves after Sudan I, an illegal red dye, was discovered in February 2005 in a sample of Crosse & Blackwell Worcestershire Sauce. In the previous months, none of the chain partners had taken their responsibility and made a proper risk assessment on the presence of Sudan I. The red dye is allowed in industrial products like shoe polish but has since long been banned in food applications. Added to foods it may permanently alter DNA or cause cancer.
The massive occurrence in convenience foods of this harmful compound, painfully illustrated that both food producers and retailers ignored warnings about Sudan I, issued by the British Food Safety Agency (FSA) as early as July 2003. It again became clear how hard it is to regulate Europe’s food chain. The sector has become part of an increasingly complex, international trading structure. In this highly competitive market, basic ingredients may be shipped and redistributed between countless suppliers, some of them obscure and anonymous. One bad apple can spoil the barrel, as the British Sudan 1 scandal illustrated. Especially when supply chain partners sit back and see instead of tackling risks in their sector.
European-wide alert
According to the FSA’s Sudan I timeline, the dye was first discovered in adulterated chilli products in May 2003. Since then the food watchdog has been working to ensure that Sudan I is kept out of the food chain. A contaminated chilli product that was discovered in July 2003 in France was traced back to one supplier: East Anglia Food Ingredients. The manufacturer recalled all shipments that were connected to this batch. However, one batch sold to Premier Food was never returned or destroyed. Instead, it was used to make Crosse & Blackwell Worcestershire sauce and used to flavour ready meals and sauces produced by more than 300 companies.
How could Premier Foods, owner of a world famous brand like Crosse & Blackwell, restock a recalled product and fail to check its Worcestershire sauce on the presence of Sudan I. Despite the FSA’s alerts, the company was completely surprised when a customer sample of its sauce tested positive for the dye. This was on 7 February 2005. Thanks to the efficiency of food safety systems, the recall was rapid. However, the very fact that it came to a recall of this extent showed the inability of the food sector to provide safe food supplies within the current regulatory framework. The sector as a whole paid a high toll for a crisis that could have been prevented with one simple laboratory analysis.
How far?
Surely, more transparency in the chain is needed in order to make better risk evaluations possible. This means first of all better communication between parties involved. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has set the first steps by launching a blueprint in order to identify, assess and communicate risks. It is a start. Based on a risked based approach, food safety problems can be prevented or controlled in a more elegant way. Priorities can be established, making food safety regulation more flexible. After all, some sectors or products pose greater risks than others so. So why would you force each individual company into a straightjacket? Floor Verdenius, senior researcher at Wageningen University and Research Centre says, “One of the principle questions is: ‘how far can you get with food safety and how far should you go?’ Remember recent incidents in feed chains. We will never be able to cut them down completely. Of course, you can make the system stricter. But food safety systems will never be watertight. Therefore, start with the identification of risks. With 20 per cent of the basic measures, you get 80 per cent of improvement. We have designed a food based safety approach, much like the principle of HACCP, for one of our clients. I believe that food safety systems in the market are too rigid and therefore too expensive. Rigid norms are not the best solution for a sector with a large amount of SMEs. These enterprises need more room for risked-based flexibility.”
Building an effective food safety system is about:
• Opening up the chain for more transparency.
• Introducing priorities based on risk-based assessment.
• Better identifying high and low risks, much like the HACCP-system.
• Solving problems at the source, not at the end of the chain.
• Realising that legal compliance is no longer sufficient.
• Developing more targeted compliance programmes.
• Using new electronic reporting and management systems to identify risks as early as possible.
• Ensuring that all ingredient stocks are tested before use based on a full track historical reports.
• Keeping the system flexible, enabling SMEs to maximise their food safety efforts against the lowest cost.
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