Security in the Supply Chain

Out for dinner at a favourite restaurant where she ate several times a week, a 56-year-old South Carolina retiree felt like something was stuck in her throat and was rushed to hospital when she began bleeding from the mouth. A closer look at her meal revealed a small piece of metal embedded in the beef patty of her hamburger. The restaurant manager told police it was part of a razor blade.

The restaurant chain, Cracker Barrel, owns 557 restaurants across the US. It promptly issued an urgent communiqué to over 310 restaurants to remove hamburgers produced on and around a date several days earlier. The fallout climbed up the chain of supply, and soon Witchita, Kansas-based Cargill Meat Solutions was launching its own investigations into the suspect batch.

It's not the first time the company, which delivered the hamburgers to customers like Cracker Barrel frozen and preformed, has been in the news with tainted products. In two separate press releases in October and November 2007, the company announced the recall of almost two million pounds of ground beef products because of potential exposure to E. coli O157:H7 bacteria.

If that sounds scary, it's just the tip of the iceberg. Another supplier, Topps Meat Company, expanded existing recalls to cover 25 million pounds of its products. That's according to the website ecoli-recall.com, set up by a law firm pursuing a class action lawsuit against Topps on behalf of plaintiffs who've been exposed.

Welcome to the 21st century of food security, where trucking frozen hamburger patties across the country is hard enough to keep safely contained. In a globalised economy, the ingredients on your dinner plate on any given night might have come from all four corners of the world, often countries with health or safety standards we'd never tolerate from our own food growers or producers.

In July 2007 The Guardian newspaper reported that almost a fifth of domestic produce in China wasn't up to that country's minimum standards.

As the world turns increasingly to China for manufacturing everything from foodstuffs to medicine, it has come under increasing fire for lax standards and has resulted in several high-profile and embarrassing cases of tainted goods finding their way across the world.

Following one of the biggest product recalls in US history (in which 60 million cans of pet food were in danger of being laced with the chemical melamine) the Chinese State Council promised to overhaul regulations and introduce inspections on a wider scale. Several commentators wryly hope they make a better job of it than they have action on IP issues.

HOMELAND SECURITY

That's why a big part of food supply chain security is put in the hands of border protection services.

Using a western world example, the body responsible for protecting borders against unsafe agents is the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service (AQIS), a division of Australia's federal ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.

Random checks or sniffer dogs in Australia's international air terminals still inspect small quantities of foodstuffs for personal use, but the scheme that monitors imported consumables is the Imported Food Inspection Scheme.

In this age of outsourcing, AQIS isn't the authority on what is safe, despite it maintaining Australia's commodity intake. In 1991 the governments of Australia and New Zealand drafted legislation in the form of the Food Standards Australian New Zealand Act 1991 to create a body advising on safe food standards.

AQIS in turn consults with Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) as to how certain foods should be treated when they arrive for sale or processing in Australasia. AQIS also asserts that the relevant state and territory food authorities monitor foods at the point of retail sale. This is often the only other part of the supply chain after border checks if food is prepared and packaged overseas.

The current management classifies foods into one of two categories – risk or random surveillance – according to FSANZ advice. Every consignment of risk food is sampled and tested, and a history of compliance can lead to a reduction of testing. Random surveillance foods represent a low risk to human health and safety and the checks are concerned only with Australian food standards compliance.

Inspections can include a visual inspection of contents or labels and microbiological, contaminant or chemical analysis specific to a food product.

IN THE SYSTEM

As most western countries enjoy high levels of economic activity in domestic food production, the borders aren't the only places to watch for dangers in food. Coca Cola Amatil is the Australasian producer for Coca Cola brands and operates bottling plants and facilities all over the region, including urban and rural Australia, New Guinea, Indonesia and the Philippines.

The first thing Gerold Knight, Australian group general manager of risk, security and fraud services advises is that the old global model no longer applies. "There's no 'one size fits all' approach to the security of consumables during production," he explains. "It is very much driven by the risk assessment that identifies critical risks to the organisation and recommends security solutions that can assist in mitigating and controlling the risks."

In the old days, Knight says, a company would build a factory and then think about securing it. He calls it a 'gates and guards' approach, and it doesn't always work. "Today, we get security involved in the planning of a plant from the initial stages," he says.

The reason? Different environments call for different solutions. If Coca Cola intends to build a soft drink bottling plant in a country where sugar is a valuable black market commodity, Knight must respond in kind with an appropriate security solution. It's a business cost that must be considered. Knight uses a risk-focused approach, and security decisions are made after a risk assessment.

"It's essentially a cost benefit analysis; what's the cause of the risk, what's the consequence?" he asks. "The costs might be prohibitive. The challenge is understanding the environment in which the business is operating. You don't only have to understand aspects of criminal behaviour, but the social demographics applicable. Both will have bearing on the overall assessment.

"For example, our response at a production facility in Papua New Guinea differs greatly from the approach we might adopt in Australia. This is where liaison with law enforcement, intelligence agencies and access to all open source material becomes important.

"We'll generally use a combination of human and technological security responses. [In either case] the business owns the risk, so we'll provide an assessment and recommendations and the business will make a call in line with acceptable levels of risk."

Knight also warns that he needs to retain a say in any security decisions, as it's his expertise and not that of the bean counters that will better inform the course of action. "One important point is that you need to ensure a management power of veto within the structure as it ensures the business doesn't make a decision that leaves the business open to security breach."

Understanding risks involved when importing products from other countries and ensuring security is appropriate to specific facilities is how the food industry should approach its issue of food contamination. Customer health and safety should be top priority for any food producing firm.