Good Practices Help Keep Companies, Consumers Protected

When it comes to food safety, it’s all about protection. Not just about protection of consumers, but protection of a company – of a brand. One way to ensure protection is by being prepared. It’s easier to correct a problem if a company is proactive and plans for it.

“Absolutely the worst time to be thinking about solutions is when you have a problem,” said Mark Jarvis, CEO of Steritech, which provides food safety consulting and conformity assessment services to companies in a variety of industries. “In the event that something happens, nobody should have to find their way.”

When companies have outbreaks, quality assurance managers are immediately granted extraordinary powers and unlimited budgets to solve the problem. The smart thing to do is to invest proactively in quality and food safety to minimize the likelihood of ever having a problem, Jarvis said.

Have the proper systems in place. Every fresh-cut processing facility should have the prerequisite GAP and GMP programs in place as well as a quality management system such as HACCP. Employees should be well trained and everyone from the CEO down should model best practices.

“It really starts with the owners and trickles down to the employees,” said Les Lipschutz, owner of Food Safety Inc. “The owners have to have an understanding and desire to move forward and better their processes and to share that and motivate all the people in the company.”

Employees should know where to turn when they have questions, and every one should know what they should be looking for. If something doesn’t look right, employees need to be empowered to make it right or get someone who can.

“You have to take into account not your own educational level of the process but go down to the basics of who might be a temporary worker with no training and some of the things the person with no training could inadvertently do to compromise the product,” said Lipschutz.

Processes should be in place to make sure there are no missteps, he said. Food safety professionals should be natural worriers. One of Lipschutz’s jobs before starting his own food safety consulting company was at Grimmway Farms, where he managed the quality assurance program. He said he was constantly aware that there were more than 100 million people who could be out there eating some of the company’s carrots.

“It used to keep me up at night and motivate me to make sure we were pluperfect in our process,” he said.

Farm to Fork

Food safety shouldn’t just begin in the plant. It goes from the farm all the way to the consumer’s table. Food safety is an issue that concerns every person working for a company: growers, farm workers, drivers, line workers, produce managers, chefs and anyone who comes in contact with produce.

“It all goes back to from the farm to the fork,” Lipschutz said. “Everything should be done hand in hand.”

Lipschutz said food safety starts from where a grower decides to put his field and ends with making sure the cold chain is maintained all the way to the end user, be it consumer or chef.

And according to Jarvis, even the most sophisticated of processors are at risk if the quality and safety of their raw product is overlooked.

“You have to take an integrated approach to this and examine the risks throughout the food chain,” he said.

He suggested that processors become active in the process. They should be visiting farms and requiring their suppliers to meet specific standards – and they should be conducting their own audits.

“Our major customers are taking food safety programs to the field, working with growers and harvesters to implement industry best practices, often at a grass roots level,” Jarvis said.

Simple improvements, such as providing daycare services to discourage working mothers from having children in the fields, setting up proper sanitary facilities with hand washing basins and improving water chlorination systems are paying dividends.

This becomes especially important when a restaurant or processor is sourcing raw product from outside the country. Other places – he provided the example of Mexico – don’t have the same standards for their farms as American growers do. And something as simple as water quality can heavily impact produce quality. If contamination goes in, it can go through to the finished product.

A processor can ask for written guarantees that a grower is using Good Agricultural Practices, Lipschutz said. It’s also a good idea for a company to send its own quality assurance team into the field to audit the growers. Just as a grocery store chain or restaurant can audit fresh-cut processors, fresh-cut processors can audit their own suppliers.

As protection, some processors are sending their quality assurance teams to retailers and restaurants to make sure product is being stored at optimum temperatures and being displayed in a way that assures product safety.

“Instead of perhaps punishing a company by saying, ‘you’re doing a terrible job managing the cold chain,’ they (processor) might go in and share the data they have collected and say, ‘how can we help you improve your display cases to ensure all the product in them can remain safe for the best-if-used-by dates,’” Lipschutz said. “This is probably the best way of doing it.”

Processors need to take responsibility for food safety from all ends of the supply chain in order to protect their brands.

Brand Protection

“Food safety is an important element of a comprehensive brand protection strategy,” Jarvis said. “If you can provide some kind of reassurance to consumers or position your product as a safer, more wholesome product, that does a lot to build equity in the brand. The problem is that when something goes wrong, it really damages the brand and takes literally five to 10 years to repair.”

Not only is there an impact from potential legal action, simply hearing a company’s name in the news associated with the words “outbreak” or “contamination” can turn consumers off. What is said in the media is carried directly to the consumer.

“In the event of an outbreak, communication is absolutely critical – both internal and external,” Jarvis said. “My advice would be to employ a highly qualified PR firm or crisis management company that can help (the processor) manage the message.”

A company’s position in the public eye means a lot. Not only does it keep the customers coming back, it could possibly help when something does go wrong and a lawsuit ensues.

Taking Responsibility

Lawsuits can involve growers and processors and restaurants – all of which can be found strictly liable, said Seattle-based attorney Bill Marler.

“It doesn’t matter whether the person you have sued did a great job trying to clean the product. If their product makes someone sick, they’re going to be held liable,” Marler said. “The only way to not get sued is to not make someone sick.”

Even when a company follows the most stringent of food safety programs, errors can occur. And usually during a lawsuit, those errors become apparent, Marler said.

“There’s always an ability to do a better job,” he said.

But having HACCP plans, GAPs, GMPs and other food safety assurance strategies in place, a company can reduce the negative feelings from the plaintiffs and jury. And though the company may still be found liable, it could reduce the amount of the damages.

“When the evidence comes in that you tried to take every step you could and these little (issues) slipped through, a jury will not get as worked up to punish the producer as they would otherwise,” said Fred Gordon, a San Diego-based attorney who works on food industry cases. “If you’ve taken proactive steps to protect the public, at the minimum, when you go to trial, it will be a fair result as opposed to an inflamed result.”

After an outbreak or contamination does occur, the steps a processor takes can speak volumes as well.

For Gordon, the processor has two options: Step up to the plate and make sure the victims get taken care of and figure out who’s at fault later, or say “it’s not me.” If you act guilty or hide from the media, the public will assume you’re guilty.

“Perception is reality,” Gordon said. “That’s how you’re able to survive these outbreaks – by dealing with it head on and making sure you can take care of the victims.”

In a legal case, the victims have to prove the product in question is actually the one that made them sick. This means the type of bacteria or virus in the victims must be found in the product. And this can often be difficult to prove, Marler said.

“If you don’t have an outbreak and you don’t have multiple people sick, it’s hard to triangulate what the common denominator is,” he said. “You have to prove causation, and sometimes causation is very difficult to prove.”

Regardless of the situation, both attorneys agreed that the best way for a company to be prepared is to take every step possible to ensure food safety from farm to fork. This means providing adequate food safety training, having procedures in place to guarantee quality and to take all necessary steps to produce a quality product that is safe for consumers.