Fresh approach needed to boost food safety understanding

03-Nov-2015 - Last updated on 05-Nov-2015 at 12:32 GMT

Consumer understanding was discussed at Food Manufacture’s food safety conference

Changes are needed in the way we deal with consumer understanding of food safety, reports Rick Pendrous.

To understand why, despite the efforts of the food producers to reduce campylobacter in the supply chain, the incidence of campylobacteriosis infection continues to rise, we need to understand better what people do in the home.

It is already well known that many of us fail to follow good food hygiene practice in the kitchen. Do we regularly wash our hands? Avoid using the same chopping board to handle raw and cooked products? Store raw and cooked foods separately in our fridges (assuming they are actually working properly)?

We are also encouraged to regularly replace dishcloths that investigations have shown to contain high levels of bacteria. And what about advice not to wash raw poultry, following the Food Standards Agency’s (FSA’s) publicity campaign on the subject?

To understand better what consumers do at home and in supermarkets, the FSA’s Social Science Research Committee (SSRC) has carried out various studies with the aim of informing future food safety management campaigns.

The SSRC’s chair, Professor Peter Jackson from the Department of Geography at the University of Sheffield, described this and other research at Food Manufacture Group’s one-day food safety conference held at the Lowry in Manchester on September 29 in a paper titled: ‘Understanding consumer anxieties about food safety and authenticity’.

Consumer paradox

The big paradox is that the high levels of reported concern about food safety in consumer surveys is not reflected in observational research – what we are found to do in practice either while shopping or in the kitchen at home.

Jackson reported that while high levels of consumer concern were reported in the immediate aftermath of the 2013 horsemeat scandal, within six months normal purchasing behaviours were returning. However, anger about deception, fraud and loss of trust in the food supply chain remained.

He described more recent consumer studies carried out by consumer group Which? in collaboration with the Government Office for Science which showed low levels of public understanding about the food supply chain.

“People make easy connections between food and issues to do with health,” said Jackson. “They are mostly concerned with issues around quality and price and they have much lower levels of understanding where food comes from or how it is produced.”

If change is to happen in what consumers do at home, then new approaches are required, said Jackson. Rather than continuing with the belief that consumers lack knowledge and by providing this knowledge, behaviours will be changed, an alternative approach is needed, he added.

“We need to start with where consumers are, rather than where we would like them to be,” Jackson remarked. He proposed moving from the old “deficit model” to “asset-based models”, which look at the knowledge consumers use in practice to make sense of sometimes conflicting advice such as that between food safety and waste.

Allergen labelling and control

The British Retail Consortium’s assistant director for food policy Andrea Martinez-Inchausti then explained how changes to food labelling under the EU’s Food Information for Consumers Regulation had changed the way information was being presented to consumers and the problems this had caused the industry.

One particular problem area related to the highlighting of all allergens within the ingredients’ list and the requirement to remove allergen boxes. The concern was that consumers often did not read ingredients’ lists and in the absence of an allergen box might – wrongly – assume allergens were not present.

To resolve this concern retailers adopted a way of “signposting” to allergens in the ingredients’ list. Martinez-Inchausti also announced that, very shortly, the BRC, in conjunction with the Food and Drink Federation, would be publishing new guidance on free-from foods for manufacturers.

The potentially lethal consequences of getting allergy advice wrong were brought into sharp focus by Hazel Gowland from Allergy Action (www.allergyaction.org).

Gowland, who has a serious nut allergy and advises the Anaphylaxis Campaign, spoke passionately about the minefield that clinically diagnosed allergy sufferers had to navigate each day. She also highlighted the dangers when things go wrong.

“Death is not common and the number of people dying per annum over the past 20 years has never been beyond 12 from food-induced anaphylaxis,” reported Gowland.

“However, the number of people at risk has gone up.”