BrainTrust Query: How should retailers and manufacturers step up their attack of the global food safety challenge?
By Ralph Jacobson,
Global Consumer Products Industry Marketing Executive, IBM
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?
Take Our Instant Poll
Loading ...
Join the Discussion!
6 Comments on "BrainTrust Query: How should retailers and manufacturers step up their attack of the global food safety challenge?"
You must be logged in to post a comment.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
The recent lapses in food safety have been due to poor managerial judgments, not because of lack of controls or inspection and testing systems. Therefore, the real crux of the problem is, how do we motivate management to make the right decision, which some times will involve losing money, if the product needs to be scrapped/destroyed, etc, due to not meeting requirements? We can have all the systems and controls in place and yet, if the managers do not make right decisions, we will not improve food safety.
The government, in effect, just fired the head of General Motors. Put managers on notice that there will be a zero tolerance policy when it comes to following and initiating food safety and quality procedures and guidelines.
Frankly, there is no such thing as end-to-end visibility in the supply chain. There will always be someone looking to cut corners for for the sake of profits. But any foreign supplier found to be shipping tainted product should be dropped immediately, with prison terms for those who knowingly did so.
Finally, just throwing money at the FDA is not the answer. We need a complete overhaul of a federal bureaucracy that’s tripping over its own feet.
The measures being discussed appear to be focused on regulating the distribution of food. Is there also an investment and attention paid to how the world’s food supply is kept safe in the first place? We have heard stories of how Chinese food suppliers have supplemented milk and other products with melamine to increase the content, so combating greed must be a battle on one front. But what about unsafe handling or toxic chemicals which find their way into foods? Is enough research being done on food production to ensure it is safe in the first place?