After reading a recent article in the Farmers Weekly regarding food fraud and safety scandals it got me thinking. Why are business cutting corners? Is it due to money? Lack of understanding? Or not having the right resources available to them to deal with problems as they arise?
There are many reports of companies caught out for falsifying paperwork, misleading customers with incorrect labels of origin or poor handling of products.
But my question is why is this still happening in this day and age?
As food safety consultants, what can we do to help food manufacturers get out of this rabbit hole and choose the correct path?
Why is Food Fraud happening?
Let’s break it down and look at the potential reasons:
Money
This is something we can’t help with directly. However, another way to look at this is investing the money you do have in a beneficial way. Invest in getting a food safety consultant to look at what you currently do including what paperwork you complete. Next, a full food safety management system is then created which in turn helps you as a company produce the best product you can.
If you have a smooth-running operation in place, with controls which prevent poor practices from occurring, you are more likely to produce good quality products. From there, it becomes about brand recognition, if your company gets a good reputation the more doors will open up for sales.
Good food safety goes hand in hand in mitigating risk of food fraud.
Accreditation
There are many varieties of food safety accreditations available for food manufacturing companies these days, it’s about choosing which is right for you as a business.
SALSA is aimed at small to medium sized companies, meaning it is an achievable accreditation which is designed to be managed by a small team. You then have BRCGS which aims for larger companies. A fairly new standard they have brought out is BRCGS Start which is the step between SALSA and full BRCGS.
By obtaining a food safety accreditation, you are automatically open to more potential business. This is because potential customers will have more confidence in your product. By pushing your company to achieve an accreditation you will have standards to aim for. It makes you put in place structured rules and protocols which allow you deal with any potential issues that may arise. It gives your processing side of the business structure which can only lead to good things.
Staff & Food Fraud
In the current climate all business are struggling to get new staff, the reason for this is a whole other debate. But it means it is more important than ever to keep the staff you currently have. How do you do this without given them large monetary bonus? Create a good work environment for them because if you work in a place where the rules are all a bit grey and chaos prevails, many people are going to leave eventually.
If you provide a work environment which is structured, with black and white rules and procedure to follow, it makes a working day less stressful. If staff see that the boss’s care and are trying their best to create a safe product by giving staff the tools they require (i.e in the event of x, y and z happening this is the protocol) it follows they are more likely to stay on and try their best.
Knowledge
Knowledge is always power. Having read this particular article, one line in particular really struck me, “..the paperwork which would pick up bacteria such as listeria and E coli was falsified.” I can’t imagine that companies would intentionally send out food products that could make people ill, so if this statement is true then why? I personally believe this could be down to knowledge and understanding.
If you are put in a situation where you don’t know what to do, you automatically choose the easiest route out. Ignorance can also be bliss in situations like this. If a company understood where and why certain bacteria can grow then they could also understand what to do. I’m not expecting everyone to be an expert in bacteria and pathogens. However, having a system in place and an effective team to assess a risk and create a corrective action plan prevents this from re-occurring. This allows the sale of safe food products to continue.
Legality
The top and bottom of it is, that everyone gets found out eventually. Cutting corners in the long run really isn’t worth it. As the Food Safety Act 1990 says one of the main responsibilities of a food business is “businesses do not include anything in food, remove anything from food or treat food in any way which means it would be damaging to the health of people eating it”
