Playing It Safe Is No Game For Food Packagers
BY MEGAN WAITKOFF,
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Turn the bevy of information available on food safety and security into a plan of attack for your company.
Are you confident that the tuna you ate today didn’t have a coat of salmonella?
How about the rice imported from China that’s sitting in your pantry. Are you sure that at some point down the production line, it wasn’t handled by the wrong employee at the wrong time who added an undetectable chemical agent?
Would you bet your life on it?
How about the lives of every person who’s ever bought packaged food?
Food manufacturers are faced with trying to provide that kind of assurance every day, with every product, for every customer. Now, with increased automation on the production line and supply chains that spread across oceans, maintaining the safety and security of a product from the ingredients to packaging to consumption is a challenge—and a necessity. Exploding media coverage of tainted products and widespread recalls have helped consumers become the No. 1 watchdog for food safety.
New government and independent certifications and innovative technologies are pushing quality control closer to a guarantee. But the food industry has a long way to go before safety steps back from center stage.
The defense mechanisms
When the Anthrax scare hit news websites and evening broadcasts in 2001, the threat of biological warfare was imminent, and food security, or what’s now being called food defense, gained popularity.
As the scare died down, the media coverage waned—but the inherent vulnerability of one of our greatest assets, our food supply, was unearthed.
“I’m constantly amazed at the things that aren’t happening that people could do,” says Russell LaCoste with SICPA Product Security. “If you look at all the packages on the shelves, there are some shrink sleeves on top of caps, but it’s in the world of real cheap. No one’s doing too much. The food side still has very little movement, and it’s frustrating from this side of the desk.”
While food defense may not be considered as much of an issue in the mainstream media as it was a few years ago, companies are taking it seriously, and they should.
“We have a historically short attention span,” says Keith Schneider with the University of Florida. “Just because we’re not talking about it doesn’t mean they’re not working on it."
Companies are making an effort, especially since the implementation of the Bioterrorism Act of 2002. The Act requires food companies to register themselves, track all ingredients and packaging from their source to their next destination, and keep a record of those transfers for a set period of time. Renee and Keith Schneider, both associate professors with the Food Science and Human Nutrition Department at the University of Florida, conducted seminars to walk growers through the registration program and help them get comfortable with self-audits.
“I think most companies generally know what they should do,” Renee says. “Implementation is probably the more problematic part of it. The big process companies for the most part understand the regulations and are fairly well buttoned up.”
Others in the security industry, like Peter Gabriele, technical director for ARmark Authentication Technologies, say companies aren’t that far along.
“One of the mandates is that everything has to be compliant by December 2005, and guess what? It’s still not,” he says. “This is what has confused the food companies, but I think they have some very smart people on their security staffs who are already doing the things for commercial purposes that could very easily be made available in the Bioterrorism Act. The real problem here is that there’s no guidance.”
Fundamental changes in the industry are also making food defense a pressing concern. Many companies are now using overseas suppliers for their product ingredients and packaging materials. Tracking and tracing throughout the worldwide supply chain is a problem, especially when countries have differing food safety standards.
The recent pet food contamination is a perfect example (see “Recall road map” below for a list of major food safety scares of the past year—and what they cost). The tainted wheat gluten found in the pet food was traced back to a plant in China that claimed to have performed the necessary safety checks. At some point in the production line, someone dropped the ball.
Keeping supply chain control is critical, and companies who are using overseas suppliers should make sure that the company they contract with is the company doing the actual work.
“The real challenge is assuming that you’re doing business with the plant you’re doing business with,” LaCoste says. “They’ll get the contract and then they’ll sub-contract it out and you won’t know the difference. You’ve lost control immediately because the work is being done in a plant that’s not certified.”
The industry is also starting to recognize the power of consumers to implement food security demands. “Terrorism has been around for awhile, and when the terrorists are as smart as the people driving the technology, you have to drive to levels of technical competence that are even higher. That involves being consumer friendly. They’re going to be our greatest police force.”
And as such, consumers will help achieve the same goal as suppliers, manufacturers and retailers. Whether it’s fighting biology or technology, it’s all about the protection of our food supply.
“This is all about risk mitigation,” Gabriele says. “You can call it bioterrorism, anti-counterfeiting, food processing. There’s a minimum expectation of safety and protection. What food companies have done on their own is food safety. On the other hand, bioterrorism is a safety issue for the protection of citizens. One is for customers, the other is for citizens.”
Safe, sound and certified
According to an online survey conducted by Harris Interactive in December 2006, 95% of Americans say they follow food safety announcements to some extent, and out of these, 67% stop eating the product until they learn it is safe to do so. The survey also shows that 15% of consumers stop eating a product entirely after a food safety incident.
In other words, don’t underestimate the consumer. If Americans are following food safety announcements, they’re also following the production and packaging of the products they purchase. If one company (or a company’s suppliers) received a food safety certification, it could impact a customer’s purchase decision.
Companies have to comply with the Bioterrorism regulations, but what about the audit from the North American Security Products Organization? Or the food safety education program from the American Institute of Baking (AIB)? Or the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) guidelines? While obviously created for the greater good, certifications have become somewhat of an alphabet soup. (For descriptions of the main certifications and audits, visit
www.fdp.com and click on the “Certification Resources” button below the “Playing it safe is no game for food packagers” headline.)
Let’s be realistic. There are almost as many certifications and audits as there are cold medicines, and manufacturers don’t have the time, money or personnel to get all of them. Achieving the most stringent certifications could wind up costing companies their market share. “Some of these companies at the highest level of certification found that it was costing them so much to be certified that they couldn’t be a low-cost supplier anymore,” LaCoste says.
Also, because of a lack of guidance on what to do and how to implement, manufacturers are being forced to self-educate.
“Small- or medium-sized companies really don’t have the people they need in order to do all of this,” Renee says. “I think everybody in the food industry probably wonders at times, am I missing something? That drives a lot of self-motivations for information.”
(To see how one company implemented the HACCP guidelines and developed its own food safety system, check out “A track-and-trace tale” on p.24.)
So which should they choose? “If your buyer wants you to get a certain brand of certification or audit, that’s what you get,” Keith Schneider says. “And if the government has a guideline, I would use that.”
Also, look for programs that enforce continued accountability after receiving certification or passing an audit.
“If you study for an exam and then forget everything you learned for it after you take it, what’s the point?” says LaCoste. “A lot of companies, as soon as they get the certification, they go back to their old ways. There’s very little enforcement.”
Renee Schneider adds that trade organizations generally know the requirements on their vendors, and would be a good resource for tackling certifications. The United Fresh Produce Association website, for example, provides a Food Safety Information Resource Center with a wealth of information on recent news, certifications, international trading and industry contacts. Each commercial entity in food has a trade organization that works at the state and local levels.
As end-user companies and consumers continue to educate themselves about food safety, getting certified or following a set of guidelines will be necessary to keep your place in the industry and on the shelf. “What gives a company its competitiveness is to be unique, and to have an edge over the competition by being able to say, I’m more safe than you are, I’m more compliant than you are,” says ARmark’s Gabriele.
Being open—and keeping your checkbook open—to new technologies could also give you a competitive edge.
Editor’s Note: This is part one of two on Food Safety and Security. For more information on what technologies your company can implement for food quality control, check out Part Two in our upcoming June issue!
For more information
American Institute of Baking Int’l 785-537-4750;
www.aibonline.org Food and Drug Administration, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (HACCP Guidelines) 888-723-3366;
www.cfsan.fda.gov/list.html
