Thoughts from the Global Food Safety Summit, Prague

7th September 2007 by Cor Groenveld

I just got back from the Global Food Safety Summit 2007 in Prague. The event featured stakeholders from the food manufacturers, retail, food services and suppliers of food ingredients. It was a series of presentations, interactive sessions and individual meetings, all based around the issues of food safety in the supply chain. The attendees and presenters were from organisations like McDonalds, Kraft, Cargill, Divaudan, DSM, AHOLD, Burger King, Cadberry, Danisco and LRQA.

Here are some of my impressions from the conference:

Mr. Bizhan Pourkomailian of McDonald’s showed how they organised food safety assurance in their supply chain and in their restaurants. He said: “we use standards like ISO-22000 because they are already there so why develop a new one”.

Mr. Crawford Robinson, responsible for security management in Kraft Foods, explained how the security in Kraft is organised. He showed that an integrated risk based management approach can help achieve assurance for the different risks of a food manufacturer.

There were a number of presentations about crisis management. Mrs. Annette Hansen from Danisco showed how they dealt with the threat of Asian flu. Dr. Paul Hall from Conagra Foods explained how they managed the case of pollution of peanut butter with salmonella and Dr. Jeff Banks from Cadbury Schweppes showed how a small leak in a corroded internal drain pipe could lead to $52 million costs and seriously damage the brand image. Next to the need of an effective crisis management system the lessons learned from these organisations was how to predict the possible occurrence of a crisis and how to prevent it.

Dr. Diego Beamonte shared some very practical examples how Burger King controls the E-coli contamination of lettuce and the control of the temperature in their supply chain.

My presentation introduced and explained the benefits of tools that can be used to implement a risk based management system throughout the supply chain. In this way all relevant risks can be covered and it supports the process of in depth risk analysis and continuous improvement.

Overall, some of the key observations were:· The high responsibility of the food sector towards consumers, not only in the field of food safety but also in aspects like health, security and sustainability.· The need for further development of Supply Chain Management, from fork to farm.· The need for harmonisation of standards and audits, to improve the effectiveness of management systems and audits and to reduce costs.· That crisis management is important, but we have to focus more on prevention.· To achieve all of this, extensive communication and cooperation between stakeholders like producers, retailers, legislators and scientists is needed.

Overall, the delegates expressed that the conference gave them good insights in the best practices of other companies and that this would help them to achieve further improvement of their management systems.

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