Top 10 Food Safety Mistakes

Don't Let This Happen At Your Operation

From LEGALLY SPEAKING BY SHAWN STEVENS, As principal of Food Industry Counsel LLC, Shawn Stevens helps food industry clients protect their brand by proactively reducing their food safety exposure. MeatingPlace Blog 6/25/2018

As most of you know, I religiously follow and study recalls and outbreaks.  What has become apparent over the course of the last decade is that all companies that manufacture food products either have already experienced, or eventually will experience, a recall.  The reasons for recalls vary wildly, ranging from foodborne illness outbreaks or the discovery of contamination that can cause them, to widespread foreign material contamination.  Notably, over the last 10 years, a handful of food companies have been involved in many recalls, and some of the largest food manufacturers have experienced dozens. 

With that background, it doesn’t seem to matter if the companies are large or small.  While many small companies do have problems, it seems like the largest food companies (who should be serving as role models for the rest of the industry) are the ones appearing most often in the news.  So, why do food companies experience so many food safety failures?  Having done this work for a long time, I offer the following general observations regarding the most common mistakes most food companies make:

  1. They are reactive, not preventive;
  2. They don’t believe that the most serious mistakes can happen to them;
  3. They buy their ingredients from the cheapest — not the safest — suppliers;
  4. They don’t perform sufficient due diligence on their supplier’s food safety programs;
  5. They rely upon the results of annual third-party audits, rather than their own facility visits or intuition;
  6. The don’t perform sufficient environmental testing (frequency and location) for pathogens of concern;
  7. They don’t assume that their products WILL become contaminated, unless they prevent it;
  8. They mistakenly believe that if pathogens are resident in the environment, they can be controlled;
  9. They don’t believe that if Listeria can get into a drain, it can just as easily get into finished product; and
  10. They fail to perform a true “root source” investigation (rather than merely a cursory “root cause” investigation), when pathogens are found in the environment.

While there are many other mistakes food companies have made, and will continue make, which lead to food safety failures, these represent the ones I see most often. 

If all companies became more preventive, scrutinized their suppliers more closely, invested in additional resources and interventions, and tested more frequently, many more food safety failures could be averted.  Thus, we should all closely follow and study outbreaks and recalls and learn from the mistakes of others.  By doing so, we will see more and more food industry role models emerge, and both industry and consumers will be much better off.