Food safety conference
Grant Foster
Aon’s head of enterprise risk management, Grant Foster, discussed areas of risk and changes in the supply chain and how to manage it.
Foster: “Do you know what the easiest thing to do with risk is? Ignore it. That’s what most companies do – they tolerate a lot of risk. If there is a low chance of something happening and it won’t have a big impact, usually we tolerate it.
“When things get a bit more probable and there is a high chance of something happening, we tend to do something about it.
“You can only do two things to treat a risk … reduce the impact or reduce the probability.
“There is always something else that you need to worry about. Some of these may be very technical things and some may be societal. The way they [retailers] are supplying goods to people is changing. We live in a multichannel world where you can order when you like and receive it when you like.
“We used to get goods from the farm or the supermarket shelf, whereas actually it is now coming to our door in a van or to the tube station [to pick up when we arrive].”