(From left to right) Jacco Vooijs, Manager QA/QC, Royal Fruitmasters, Peter Verbaas, Secretary of the Board of Directors and Vice President, Frugi Venta and Dr. Leon Mol from Ahold during the PMA Connections presentation; Creating Conversation: A Discussion in Food Safety.
“In the 1970s, availability was a major issue, then it was taste in the 1980s, like the environment was in the 1990s and social responsibility was in the 2000s,” said Leon Mols from Ahold while speaking during the recent PMA Fresh Connections held last week in Rotterdam. “As sourcing managers, we have to balance quality, sustainability and availability every day, but food safety is separate from that.”
Food safety doesn't enter into that balancing act because it can never be compromised. It's a business to business consideration, and, because Mols deals with so many suppliers from different parts of the world, it takes significant effort to make sure the food they sell meets safety standards.
“We can't go to an incident-driven system,” said Mols. “We need a structure that prevents conditions where products are unsafe.”
That means anticipating what factors can lead to unsafe products. Through sampling, Mols can determine that certain parts of the world – like parts of South America, Africa and Asia – have producers whose food has a higher likelihood of some kind of problem. It doesn't mean that retailers can't source product from those countries, but it means that additional scrutiny is necessary when sourcing produce from those countries. By the same token, it doesn't mean that suppliers from countries that are less risky aren't examined. But whatever the level of scrutiny, keeping track of everything that's sourced around the world is a tall order, and retailers must work with their suppliers in ways they have not done so in the past.
“Our suppliers need to tell us what the issues are, and we need to create conversations around this,” said Mols. “We are no longer in that time when we could tell suppliers what's good for them; the world is too complicated, technology too sophisticated and assortment too wide for us to be experts on everything.” The world is becoming more complicated with the ways in which fresh produce is being
consumed. Broccoli, for example, is more often eaten raw as a snack, and the lack of cooking skips a step that kills illness-inducing pathogens. So the way food safety risks are considered have to taken into consideration changing food trends.
“A supplier that sends melons to a retailer for the melons to be sold whole is different from a supplier who sends melons to the fresh cut industry where there's a shorter shelf life and more dangers of contamination,” said Mols. “With the market changing, you have to be more specific than you were in the past.”
Jacco Vooijs, Royal Fruitmasters, Dr. Leon Mol, Ahold and Peter Verbaas, Frugi Venta.
The level of chemical residues found on fruits and vegetables has also entered into the food safety conversation. Retailers did not used to worry much about those residue levels, but pressure from watchdog groups that name retailers who carry food with high residue levels has changed that.
“It has now become a marketing tool for retailers,” said Jacco Vooijs of Royal Food Masters. “If they're below the minimum residue levels required by the European Union, they can point to the lists that these groups publish and show that they're doing well.”
Like Mols, Vooijs believes communication between suppliers, of which he is one, and retailers is important when it comes to old issues of food safety and new considerations. In the case of residue levels, for example, he wants a system that makes it easy for retailers to pull up information on the food they're buying all the way down the supply chain.
Jacco Vooijs, Royal Fruitmasters.
When discussing food safety, Vooijs also noted that one of the most unsafe things one can do, with respect to fruits and vegetables, is not consume them at all. While residue levels have garnered attention as of late, most of the health issues faced by people today have to do with what's in their diets.
“We can't skip on food safety, but the thing we should focus on is increasing consumption,” said Vooijs. “Consumption is declining, and only 25 percent of the people in the Netherlands eat enough fruits and vegetables. We need to make sure that consumption is increasing.”