BrainTrust Query: How should retailers and manufacturers step up their attack of the global food safety challenge?
Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) President and CEO Pam Bailey sent a letter to Barack Obama on March 20 in support of the President's proposal to create a food safety working group to coordinate federal food safety efforts.
"Americans enjoy one of the safest food supplies in the world, but food and beverage companies recognize that steps must be taken to make our food supply even safer. Ensuring the safety of our products - and maintaining the confidence of consumers - is the single most important goal of the food and beverage industry. Product safety is the foundation of consumer trust, and our industry devotes enormous resources to ensure that our products are safe.
"Our industry strongly supports efforts to continually improve the safety of America's food supplies and we urge the Administration to continue to make the prevention of contamination the foundation of our nation's food safety strategies."
Within the letter, GMA offered the President six specific recommendations:
- Increase FDA food-related spending
- Require food safety plans
- Require foreign supplier safety plans and build foreign capacity
- Regulate fruits and vegetables
- Adopt a risk-based approach to inspections
- Authorize mandatory recalls
Peanut butter. Milk. Baby food. Spinach. These are just some of the higher-profile recalls we've seen in the past year. In the U.S. alone, 300 million pounds of meat and poultry products were recalled between 1994 and 2007. Consumers increasingly demand to know more about the food they buy, such as how animals were raised and in what conditions they were kept, from farm to dinner table. It's understandable, when there are 76 million cases of food borne illnesses every year in the U.S. alone.
Matiq, a subsidiary of Norway's largest food supplier, is developing a technology infrastructure to potentially track every chicken breast, every pork chop, every lamb shank and every beef filet they produce for the Norwegian food market. Their system will enable the packaging of products with RFID tags to help keep them in optimal condition. At the production factory, sensors will be encoded with data and included with each piece of meat. As the meat is cut, the system will provide information to the sensors, including the farm of origin and the animal's age and health records. RFID readers will then capture the information as the sensors pass through the different stages of the process, from production to distribution to delivery.
As a result, Norwegian food suppliers and supermarkets will have more and better information about the meat they sell, and will be able to use software to trace the food anywhere in the supply chain.
Matiq's smart food system can help suppliers and grocers reduce costs and improve safety. Even more importantly, it can increase consumers' confidence in the quality of the food they purchase by providing detailed information on where any given animal has lived and what it has eaten. One industry analyst expects that, by 2015, 900 billion food items worldwide could be RFID tagged.
Discussion Questions: How do you provide the end-to-end visibility across the supply chain necessary for improving the safety of our food supply? Is RFID the answer? How are efforts complicated as products cross international borders? Which stakeholder needs to spearhead the effort: retailers, manufacturers, or both?