Consumer trust in our food industry is ‘broken’

08-Oct-2013 - Last updated on 25-Oct-2013 at 13:45 GMT

Tesco's guilty pork chop was labelled as British meat but almost certainly produced in The Netherlands

The horsegate scandal identified “key gaps” in many manufacturers’ due diligence processes, according to the boss of a traceability and auditing software specialist.

Firms needed to extend their traceability past the legally required ‘one-up, one down’ to ensure confidence in their products – particularly with today’s complex global supply chains – and embrace the latest IT systems, said Jonathan Evans, md of software specialist Muddy Boots.

“The big thing is [horsegate] has highlighted key gaps in everyone's due diligence processes – not only in meat,” said Evans. Retailers are driving these improvements, he added. “For us quality assurance is the big new driver and operational data capture is the key.”

Back to the drawing board

Evans said: “In general, people have gone back to the drawing board and had a deeper look at their due diligence systems – especially around knowing who they have got in their supply chain, where they are, and what products they are producing for them.”

He recognised such incidents – most recently compounded by the discovery of pork, believed to be from the Netherlands, in a Tesco chop labelled British – had further undermined consumer confidence in the UK’s food industry, and hit sales. “The trust is a little broken at the moment, I would say.”

Retailer audits of their suppliers alone would not be sufficient to identify dodgy practices, added Evans. “What's going to take place is information movement up and down the supply chain and having visibility of that information is going to enormously help cover off a lot of these issues.

Pivotal

“It is pivotal in that, with the advent of internet and cloud-based technology, it's going to really break down the communication barriers ... so that everyone has a high degree of transparency deep into the supply chain, with retailers and their suppliers and their suppliers collaborating on the agenda.”

Evans claimed paper-based systems were “expensive to maintain” with data that “is probably not very accessible or easy to share one-up and one down”.

Don’t miss Food Manufacture’s Food safety conference: What have we learnt from recent crises?, at the National Motorcycle Museum in Solihull on October 17. For details visit FoodManEvents.

What they are not telling you

Posted by Jim Flynn, 11 October 2013 - 10:42 GMT

75% of food and drinks businesses operate paper-based systems and what no one is talking about in the wake of horsemeat is that this is a key risk factor in food fraud and food safety issues happening. It's also easy to cover things up by falsifying records and as Jonathan Edwards says its an expensive hidden cost to have people pushing paper about the place.

Perhaps the biggest thing they don't tell you however is that their paper-based systems produce little meaningful information to help with identifying improvement programmes to make things better. This is why food safety in the UK and the EU has fundamentally not improved in 20 years.

Mandate electronic audit trails for food safety management now - it's not all about traceability.

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