Food Manufacture’s Business Leaders’ Forum returned for a second session, following a hugely popular February 2025 event.
The event, which is organised by the Food Manufacture team, welcomed back esteemed food safety expert, Alec Kyriakides, as its June 2025 chair. The session focused on three big topics – navigating product recalls, artificial intelligence, and health & safety in the factory. As usual, before we dove into the planned agenda, we reviewed the topics from the last session and gave the attendees space to share what was top of their minds.
Among the topics discussed during this icebreaker was, perhaps unsurprisingly, the frustration over the Government’s inaction and its lack of understanding of the food sector.
“Agritech is in there as a key focus of the government going forward, so that’s positive,” one delegate said on the recent Industrial Strategy. “But food manufacturing is not seen as a key critical infrastructure.”
It’s worth noting that since the conference, the publication of the Government’s 10 Year Health Plan has been unveiled. While this outlines some big ambitions, it’s unclear how these will be achieved.
As Professor Tim Lang told Food Manufacture: “We need detail now”.
Reoccurring worries emerged too, such as labour and education.
“We’ve been having this conversation for 20 years – and it still isn’t getting better. In fact, I think it’s getting worse,” one attendee noted.
Another agreed: “It is getting to the crunch point now. I was talking to a university last night – they have 13 students on their [food] science course. [If this continues] these courses are not going to be viable.”
Indeed, as industry veterans set to retire, the skills gap offers up not just the problem of capacity but also the potential for lost knowledge.
Whilst the teaching curriculum is crowded already, the delegates generally agreed food should be made a priority. After all, it links to major issues the government says it wants to fix, such as the NHS. If we get our health right, the pressure on the NHS will start to deplete.
The room also agreed that education needs to start at the home. However, as Luke Townsend, head of commercial at Algenuity, told Food Manufacture post-session: “This is a vicious circle (IMO) as the lack of education has covered a generation and parents are in no position to educate their children – or very few of us are.”
While the food sector is doing its best to engage with its local communities, inviting schools into the factories is not always easy to coordinate. It’s clear that the UK Government needs to improve its understanding around the role food and drink plays in our society and ensure that proper time and investment is put into the industry.
Navigating food recalls
Among the topics on the planned agenda for June was food recalls and withdrawals. To kick off the conversation, Kyriakides shared some insight on data from public recalls across the world. The data showed the remarkable consistency in the hazards and food groups driving them.
Among the hazards triggering recalls, allergens were very high, with milk being the most common allergen, together with microbiological contamination where Listeria monocytogenes was frequently the dominant pathogen. Food groups most likely to be associated with recalls were processed, ready to eat products such as salads, cooked meat and prepared meals.
Establishing the facts
Drawing from his decades of experience in food safety, notably as Sainsbury’s head of quality, safety and supplier performance, Kyriakides underscored the importance of establishing the facts.
He explained that thoroughly investigating a potential incident can reveal interesting truths. It could even transpire that the issue was not a result of your product at all, but something else entirely.
In a fictitious example of a glass-related recall, the food safety guru advised: “Test to see if it’s industrial glass or whether it’s domestic glass. That’s really important because it can lead to quite significant decisions.”
As the conversation opened up to the group, some of the delegates shared their stories of recalls they’d experienced and how they occurred. The common theme was ‘be prepared’.
We did unfortunately have a recall years ago and it came down to a supplier changing allergens in the spec without notifying anyone.
Delegate at Business Leaders' Forum - June 2025
“We do recall exercises quite regularly and the management of it was actually quite straightforward. Everyone knew what they were supposed to be doing and we managed, within 24 hours, to get the whole thing sorted. So I think the practice part – although it can feel mundane to do every year – made it so slick.”
Indeed, in a recall scenario, where you’ll likely be feeling flustered already, the last thing you want is not to be familiar with your processes. The ability to access information when you’re in the heat of a crisis is key. This information means you can come up with a coherent plan to deal with and explain that incident.
One delegate offered a new approach they’ve introduced to source this information more easily, which involves collecting all the necessary data from their suppliers with every shipment. To this end, if a recall does occur, it means that the company has all the insight it needs to trace it back without having to go chasing suppliers.
The delegate explained that suppliers can get defensive in recall situations and whilst they said they trust them, they added that the most sensible course of action is to act like they don’t.
We have no idea if they’re fabricating documents, origin, or doing whatever to cover their tracks. We trust our suppliers, but the horse meat scandal taught us that we have to act as if we don’t trust them.
Delegate at Business Leaders' Forum - June 2025
Another attendee emphasised the importance of “going down to farm level” where many recalls are triggered – think heavy metals, pesticides.
“If you’re just sitting auditing all these factories, you’re not really getting to where the risks are,” they elaborated.
The data maze
Of course, holding onto such a mammoth amount of data is one of the big issues impacting the sector and it’s important that you have a system that enables you to organise it all and access it quickly.
The majority of business leaders in the room noted that it is ‘quick and easy’ to access data from their systems in the event of serious incident – a promising result.
However, it’s not just a question of your own data being in order but that of supplier data too – which can vary wildly.
This was flagged by a delegate at the event: “We had an incident recently and one of the things that we struggled with was not necessarily the availability of information, but the different information that was available to us because the supply chain was quite long and convoluted and we had quite differing test results. It highlighted the lack of standardisation in test methods used.”
Ted Combs, who is global consumer productions industry principal at Aveva – the June 2025 Business Leaders’ Forum sponsor – agreed, but said technological solutions are improving.
“We do see lots of advances in the ability to connect to different sources of data and to do it in such a way to authenticate it. The solutions and the capabilities are improving dramatically,” he said.
To this end, Aveva has created ‘Connect’ – a software platform which allows users to aggregate, curate, and share information securely and easily across multiple sites and data types in a collaborative and frictionless environment.
Data sharing is an incredibly important part of the puzzle and the sector will benefit greatly from insights being more widely available – data shared not just between sites but also across the entire industry. However, that is easier said than done.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has been encouraging the use of root cause analysis for around seven years now and putting in place guidance and e-learning to help businesses do this.
“Every time there’s a qualifying incident (allergens, pathogens, foreign bodies etc.), we ask for the root cause analysis,” explained Anne Gravett from the FSA.
While the FSA has done a lot of work to encourage businesses to carry out root cause analysis, with the BRC Global Standards now also having weaved root analysis into its standards, there is opportunity to go further and use this data to identify patterns.
The problem is that a lot of the data the FSA receives is free text so it’s difficult to interpret it. To address this, the FSA has set up several Joint FSA/FSS industry groups to look at Root Cause Analysis received to extract the learnings, determine where sectors should be shining a light, and developing further technical guidance.
Artificial intelligence and the food sector
Once we have great data built up, the potential for AI to be used to enhance food safety will be significant – and this is an area that the FSA has been working on for a few years already and looking to develop further.
The agency has developed the Signal Prioritisation Dashboard, which provides it with early warning of emerging risks. The horizon-scanning application sits at the heart of the FSA’s strategic surveillance programme and uses advanced AI tools to analyse, categorise and translate data from dozens of open sources each day, consolidating signals related to food, feed and food contact materials into a single access point.
In a statement made last month, Susan Jebb, chair of the FSA said, “the benefits have been substantial”, giving the FSA a much clearer picture of food safety issues impacting the UK. It has also minimised its reliance on third-party systems which has resulted in “significant annual savings”.
“We sometimes detect signals ahead of other systems, giving our analysts and intervention teams invaluable lead time,” added Jebb.
Across the leaders in the room, our Business Leaders’ Forum poll revealed that more than half are using AI in their job on a daily basis, and in number of creative ways. Examples given included meeting summaries, tracking slips and falls, job descriptions, and lead generation.
During the discussions, the group chatted about the definition of AI, with varying explanations. One interesting comment from Combs was that AI should, one day, be able to go beyond what the human mind is capable of. Indeed, in today’s data-exhaustive world, where there never seems to be enough time, it would be pretty handy (if perhaps slightly scary) to have such AI available.
Right now, however, it’s best to consider AI as an additional teammate – in other words, like anyone in your team it is fallible. Trusting AI implicitly is unwise – especially if it’s AI that is open to the entire internet. The proliferation of fake news could mean its sources are false and unreliable. As the saying goes, if you put rubbish in, you’ll get rubbish out.
One tactic when using AI is to ask it for references – and verify where it is getting its data from. While another a delegate involved suggested implementing the ‘five whys’ approach, in other words, ask the AI ‘why’ five times and see what further insight it offers. But it’s also about the prompts you offer the AI, the better the question and more context you give it in the first place, the more reliable and insightful it will be.
There’s currently not much guidance into AI and what platforms food businesses should use, but – as raised by the group – it would be useful for such guidance to be curated by a body such as the FSA in the future.
Reflecting on the session, Lianne Murphy from Princes told Food Manufacture: “It’s clear that AI is opening up significant opportunities and potential for smarter, safer, and more sustainable methods of food production and distribution.”
On attending the event she added: “I found it particularly valuable hearing the diverse examples of how food businesses are leveraging AI, whether to enhance visibility and management of health and safety issues, support marketing and sales efforts, or driving innovation through advanced data analysis, and many other technical applications.”
Health and Safety in the factory
The final topic of the day was health and safety, with Kyriakides setting the scene with key figures from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE).
The data revealed that slips, trips or falls (on the same level) are the most common kind of non-fatal accident (37%) within manufacturing; followed by falls from a height (15%); and struck by a moving, including flying/falling, object (14%). And the severity of such accidents happening in your workplace can be eyewatering.
During the discussion, the room offered several examples of how they have been improving health and safety at work, with many of the leaders starting out each day with a health and safety meeting to cement good practice and reflect on potential risks.
One of the delegates attending the forum described the actions their business has taken; this included an intelligent system which can identify whether employees have a driving licence. To this end, the technology can stop an individual from operating a forklift (it simply won’t start) if they do not have the appropriate credentials.
The business has also started collating data around slips, trips and falls, and through this has identified the most common reasons as to why these happen. As part of this it also has integrated a system which, can detect in real-time not just when an incident has happened, but who was there, what time it happened and where.
“You can tackle quite a few things when you have the right data,” they added.
Meanwhile another business leader explained that their company has actually made reporting near misses or incidences part of its bonus scheme.
For every 500 near misses you report, you avoid one accident. Because you’ll learn enough from those near misses and change your practices.
Delegate at Business Leaders' Forum - June 2025
As the delegate explained, this is about making sure your team feel safe and know that reporting near misses is good, rather than them living in fear of getting in trouble and staying quiet as a result.
…But it’ll never happen to me
During the conversation it became apparent that the common denominator for accidents appeared to be taking one’s eye off the ball – from experienced workers being distracted, to new factories moving the attention away from old sites.
“You get this kind of cognitive dissonance, that ‘I know what I’m doing, I’m doing the right thing’, or ‘it’s something that happens to someone else, it doesn’t happen to me’, or ‘we’ve never had a serious accident’,” one delegate suggested.
“And I think that’s our biggest challenge, this false sense of security.”
And the impacts of such an incident are not just financial, they can weigh heavy on you as a person, as the delegate vocalised: “I hadn’t realised the impact it can have on you as a human being.”
They spoke of an incident that had happened in a company they worked in previously explaining that the HSE went to prosecute the individual rather than the board.
“So the operator I knew was just completely destroyed by it.”
“Just to see the effect of that on everyone in the company – and it wasn’t a bad company, it was a good company – it can show you the terrible things can happen to good people.”
According to our poll, the majority (74%) of leaders feel they invest enough time in H&S, but they also believe they could do more. This is arguably a good result, with the leaders in the room recognising health and safety as an area that needs constant attention and development.
This was a notion several delegates echoed; as one attendee said: “There isn’t a business that hasn’t gone through something. Every year is another learning curve.”
