Andrew Smith Interview - day one at the Global Food Safety Conference

This morning at the Global Food Safety Conference, we talked to Andrew Smith, LRQA's Senior Vice-President, Americas. Andrew talked about some of his early discussions with organisations in the food sector on day one of the Washington, D.C. event. (Listen to or download the audio podcast here)

Well, the emerging themes I think we are seeing from the traffic so far this morning are very much on harmonisation and consistency, so organisations are looking to harmonise the standards they’re applying within their own businesses and their suppliers. They are looking to ensure that an audit completed in China is the same as an audit completed in Columbia, which is the same as an audit completed in Peru, they’re looking for consistency of audit.

Global Food Safety Conference - Day One

We are at the Global Food Safety Conference in Washington D.C for the rest of this week. LRQA is one of the premium sponsors of the event, with our leading global technical expert, Cor Groenveld, giving two presentations during the conference.
This morning J P Suarez, the Chairman of the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) started the conference off.

We will back later today with some quotes from his opening speech, as well as interviews with Cor Groenveld, Andrew Smith and Martin Brown.

INSPECTION TO PROCESS MANAGEMENT – THE EVOLUTION OF FOOD SAFETY MANAGEMENT

As we have all seen over the course of the past few years, the impact of food safety scares go well beyond the immediate costs of the incident itself.  The direct costs of such incidents can be relatively modest, but the impact on brand reputational risk can potentially put organizations out of business.  Global food organizations recognize this concern and are consequently bringing a clear focus to this concern at Board level.    

Historically, food safety has been ensured through inspection.  This approach has served the industry well to a degree for many years, however the fundamental problem with that approach is that it’s limited to what is seen on the day, and thus clearly has inherent limitations.  Indeed, many of the high profile food safety scares of the past few years had inspection regimes in place and they were being followed. However, because either the underlying weaknesses did not by chance result in physically observable problems on the day of the audit, or because these symptoms were not seen by the inspectors, remedial action was not taken and it was only a matter of time before a serious food safety event ensued.