Food safety conference
John Barnes
The FSA’s head of its local delivery division, John Barnes, spoke about the issues a long supply chain could bring businesses, campylobacter and social media.
Barnes: “One pizza contains 35 ingredients, passing through 60 countries and five continents. Now the take home message … [is] the potential for authenticity failures – anybody that knows about traceability [knows] the minute you go from one place to the next you’ve got an issue and you need control.
“It requires effective control, clearly it requires good collaboration and it requires intelligence across the global supply chain.
“You will be working with us [FSA] I hope to work with the agency and other regulators to share that intelligence.
“In terms of social media, it helps with campaigns. [It helped us with] campylobacter, a huge issue we’ve got to get on top of.
“We used, during food safety week, the power of social media. Every major retailer worked with us on our campaign about washing your chicken – a counter-intuitive message to tell people ‘don’t wash your chicken.’
“When we put that out and we had a thunderclap, which was we made sure all the social media went off at the same time, we had a reach of 30M. 30M [people] got that information and actually it didn’t scare people, it didn’t alter their purchasing habits.
“It gave them a message that campylobacter was an issue and we want to work with businesses and encourage businesses to drive down the levels on poultry.”