FOOD SAFETY
Has food safety certification reached its use-by date? Words by Bill McBride
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n December last year I stepped aside (try not to say ‘retired’ - never say never) from my direct involvement in food safety certification – after twenty years in food and beverage manufacturing followed by thirty as a journeyman food safety professional. During that time I had the good fortune to meet and work with dedicated and committed people in many sectors and countries colleagues I audited, trained or consulted with, debated with, even argued with, but ultimately learned from and respected. Food safety certification started in the nineties. Yes, there were second party Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) and hygiene audits before that – I was on the receiving end of some of them - but the nineties was the decade when third party food safety management certification took off. There were many reasons for this. The launch of ISO 9000 in 1987 familiarised industry in general with management system certification, although the food industry soon recognised that a generic quality management standard did not adequately cover the fundamental
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needs of the food supply chain. A number of unfortunate global food events brought this into stark focus and spooked the industry. The fatal 1993 Jack in the Box E. coli O157:H7 outbreak became a catalyst for food safety reform in the USA. In our own backyard, E. coli 0111 in Garibaldi mettwurst resulted in haemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS) in 23 consumers in 1995, including one young death. The very next year, around 500 Australian consumers were seriously ill from consuming peanut butter laced with Salmonella. Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) peaked in the UK in 1993 and resulted in the onset of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in 1994-96. The global food industry became increasingly nervous as consumer confidence waned. Food safety standards and second party audits became more formalised and more frequent, encouraged by regulatory changes that permitted a due diligence defence (eg, the UK Food Safety Act, 1990). The Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) methodology, which had been available in various
forms for decades, was recognised by the Codex Committee on Food Hygiene in 1993, and adopted by the Codex Alimentarius Commission, the joint body of the FAO and WHO, in 1997. By the mid-nineties, the seven principles and twelve steps of Codex HACCP became the norm for identification and control of microbiological, chemical and physical food safety hazards. Third party standards appeared, along with accreditation processes, to maintain the rigor and integrity of food safety certification based on the pre-established ISO 9000 model. The second half of the decade saw the birth of third-party standards – the Australian SQF Code, the BRC Global Standards and EurepGAP (now GlobalGAP). The European-based retailer standard IFS followed in 2003. (As a footnote, it was not until 2005 that the international HACCP based food safety management standard ISO 22000 was published. Had it been earlier, would we have needed the commercial third-party food safety standards? It’s a moot point.) In 2000 the Paris-based retail network CIES established the Global Food Safety Initiative – GFSI (now
