SECTOR REPORT
FOOD SAFETY
ALL EYES ON THE
FINISHED PRODUCT
F
ebruary marked the 30th Anniversary of the start of the ground campaign for Operation Desert Storm. While a Gulf War milestone may not seem directly connected to the food processing and logistics industry, it did bring me back to when I was a 19-year-old Veterinary Food Inspector (91R) in the Army during the Gulf War. The early 1990s was an amazing period of time, with the world on the cusp of a new era in technology. In the Army, we were just getting into the digital age, using highspeed (2,400 baud) modems. We could place an order “online” and it would show up at its destination, hopefully meeting specification. With more than 30,000 soldiers in the system, the daily feeding supply line was tenuous at best. I was the last inspection point prior to troops eating. We received rations from logistics bases (later in the deployment) or the port, who received them by ship, or in rare cases, air transport.
The “technology” at my disposal was a dial thermometer, a wrench to calibrate, two inspection stamps and a notebook. Yet, the process was anything but simple. The Department of Defense via Army Food Inspectors performed inspections at each step in the process on the home front or required proof of inspections. We were still using World War II/Cold War-era strategies and executing against those guidelines. We believed it was better to stop something defective while it was still on U.S. soil before going through the trouble of shipping it to Saudi Arabia. Fast-forward to the present civilian food supply chain. The concepts behind the movement of food to market, in its basic form, hasn’t changed. Nor has the concept of production of food products. What has changed though is the science and technology, from the variety of ways companies can monitor in the field to electronic vision inspection, x-ray, automated probes, etc. The amount of data
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All members of the food supply chain must become more proactive in understanding how their supply chain works.
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that can be pulled together about a product at any point in the supply chain today is pretty amazing, yet overwhelming. Food processors and logistics providers have the ability to track product from ingredient to end user. On the meat industry side, they can track every cow from the time it was born to the steak on the plate. The real question though is, are companies really taking advantage of food safety technology? In most cases, the answer is “sort of.” You can ask a supplier about the safety of its raw materials, and that supplier will often provide documentation or mention its “program,” “HACCP” or how they processed it, etc. But, does the supplier really know? Again, the real answer is often, no, they do not know. Most will say the audit assures food safety. But, the trouble with audits are that they occur semi-annually at best. What happens when the auditor isn’t there? The auditors don’t follow every shipment; they only check a statistical percentage. The thing is, even with all the technology available, you have to include the tried-andtrue inspection methods of the past. You must have eyes on the entire process. In the Army, 30 years ago, we fed over 1 million men and women with very few issues concerning food safety. Since those days, we have discovered that even if we inspect product every step of the way, bad product still gets through, and even if we audit companies on a routine basis, we often get the same negative result. Imagine if there were no eyes on the product. Do you know your farmer, your preprocessor, etc.? While it sounds kitschy to some and maybe preposterous to others, having this relationship and knowledge assures your products are safe. You don’t have to spend enormous amounts on audits, nor your limited human resources on second-party reviews. Each of those
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3/26/21 3:01 PM
