Page 40 - Food & Drink Magazine October 2019

HYGIENE & SAFETY
Process over crisis
If food quality and safety standards are to be embedded in a company’s culture, a shift in focus is needed, says McCormick & Co director of Global Quality Systems and Food Safety Jill Hoffman. By Kim Berry.
RECOGNISE THE PROCESS RATHER THAN THE CRISIS Building a food integrity culture means embedding the right behaviours, making sure there are programs and processes to sustain those behaviours, and that it becomes embedded and the social norm in the company’s processes and functions. Hoffman talked about how
food safety professionals can be “crisis junkies”.
“We are always the firefighters dealing with emergencies and issues. And some of us thrive on that.
“It’s an instant high and gives a hero mentality, but there are some not good aspects to that.”
It is the things that are not glamorous that help embed food safety and quality behaviours, she said.
“Take that firefighting mode and move it over to embedding food safety and quality behaviours. And the only way we’re going to do that is by doing the work.
“The work is the unsexy stuff. It’s the root cause analysis, it’s the putting in processes, verifying, educating, enabling, continuing to follow-up, awareness.
“It’s the follow-up after the crisis. And we really need to spend more time there.
AT THE APAC Food Safety Conference held in Sydney in August, McCormick & Co director of Global Quality Systems and Food Safety Jill Hoffman presented the keynote address calling for a shift in terminology from food safety to food integrity. The changing breadth of work done by food safety and quality professionals demanded it, she said.
“We spend a lot of time protecting our goods around those physical, chemical and biological hazards but I think when we talk about emerging risks – there is a lot more on our plate,” Hoffman said.
“We are no longer just protecting from those risks, but all the other risks that have come into our supply chain. There are now sustainability and social responsibility demands around our products and issues like adulteration. So we’re doing a lot these days to protect our products and uphold our brand, so food integrity is more appropriate for what we do.”
Five trends that are unfolding around the world have added
complexity to food integrity: 1. Globalisation of our food
supply system;
2. Greater complexity of our
supply chain in terms of where
our food is coming from; 3. There are rising purity
concerns, so making sure that the food we’re purchasing and selling to people is authentic;
4. We have increased regulator activity which has also upped the ante; and
5. sustainability issues and making sure we are producing food that is good for our planet.
Hoffman said these changing global realities mean the sector has to start thinking differently to manage all the demands.
At McCormick, six principles around food have been established, with Hoffman pointing out they go beyond food safety and quality.
It includes: the food we produce is safe and legal; the food we produce is authentic; the food we produce is nutritious; the systems we use to produce our food are sustainable; our food is
produced to the highest ethical standards; and we respect the environment and those who work in our food industry.
Food safety has historically focused on the plant and facilities, she said.
“We talk a lot about the plant, a lot of the focus is on the facilities, what we’re doing
“ We are always the firefighters dealing with emergencies and issues. And some of us thrive on that. It’s an instant high and gives a hero mentality, but there are some not good aspects to that.”
in the facilities, how our people are handling the food in the facilities, how we’re driving food safety culture with the people in the facility.
“A lot of the time, that conversation forgets about programs that go on outside that facility and the food safety culture we build with those other functions that do have a place in the food safety and supply chain.”
“We don’t glamorise the work, we glamorise the firefighting. We’re not giving people awards for a root cause analysis – we’re giving awards to people because they did a great job during a crisis management situation.
“Maybe we don’t reward the firefighting so much and instead recognise the work we do to embed food safety behaviours we’ll see change.” ✷
40 | Food&Drink business | October 2019 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au