Five Steps to Manage a Food Safety Crisis

This is continuation of our earlier post on Food Traceability

Part 2 – The Five Steps

1. Don’t Panic – you need to act quickly to demonstrate that you care about your customers, but there’s no point taking action before you know the facts. Call your team together for a crisis meeting. Include the technical and operations people who will know the details. Get all the facts out into the open in at atmosphere of ‘no blame’. Keep records of the meeting to demonstrate that you took immediate and effective action.

2. Quantify the Risk – use your traceability system to identify the defective batches and the geographical spread. How far down the supply chain has the product gone? The risk assessment needs to be quick - minutes not days.

3. Take prompt action to control the risks – any delay now will send a clear message to your customers that you do not care about their health. If appropriate, take immediate action to stop production. Quarantine products from the defective batch in your stores and goods-out bays. Inform the businesses you have supplied to and ask them to hold all products pending collection.

4. Consider a Public Recall – if the effected products have reached the retail outlets and have been sold to customers, then you need to do a public recall. There are currently very few recalls in India, but this will change as more major food brands develop. Prepare a Press Release that states the key facts and is written in a factual way that does not create alarm. Most recall press releases start with a phrase along the following lines; ‘We strive to ensure that all our products are perfectly safe and the health of our customers is our primary concern, however .... ‘. Provide clear details of product description, code numbers and dates. Provide a phone number so people can call for more details.
Inform the FSSAI. Send the press release to the local papers in the relevant areas and also to your retail outlets. Ask retail outlets to display the release in a prominent place.

5. Carry out a Review - have you taken action to prevent a recurrence? Did your traceability system and communication plan work? What was the response of your customers? Use the results of the review to develop your plans and improve your systems.


The first time a company does a public recall there may be a hit on reputation, but this is nothing compared to the damage caused by not doing a recall until you are found out. In time, the public will realise that it is the responsible companies who do recalls and that they are part of an effective process to protect their health.

Traceability, Recalls and Public Relations

5 Steps to Manage a Food Safety Crisis Traceability, Recalls and Public Relations
Part 1 - Preparation

Public recalls of food products due to food safety concerns are comparatively rare in India, but with the growing capability of the Food Safety & Standards Authority of India (FSSAI)and with the development of branded food products they will soon become commonplace as a tool to protect customers when something goes wrong with a food production process.

Even the most diligent of food businesses can have a problem that only comes to light after the products have been dispatched. The problem may sometimes be due to the actions of ingredient suppliers who inform you of an issue after you’ve already dispatched your products, or the breakdown of sterilisation equipment that is only detected during a routine audit or even a mistake in the labelling of allergens or ingredients that is only noticed when the product is on the shelves.

So if you have invested years and crores of Rupees in the marketing and promotion of a brand, it pays to know what to do when your Production Manager says to you “I think we may have problem” or your bakery assistant says “anyone seem my knife?”.
But first you need to ensure that you have the basic processes in place to enable you to manage any food safety crisis.

Planning Ahead:

You will be unable to react fast enough to satisfy the expectations of your customers unless you have the building blocks of a food safety management system in place. These need not be complex or sophisticated systems and often the simplest processes are the best.

1. Communication Plan – who has the accountability for food safety? Who is authorised to instigate a recall process? Do you have all the out-of-hours contact numbers for key people? Can you set up a conference call at short notice?

2. Monitoring System – regular audits of your premises, equipment, processes and suppliers are needed so you can spot when something is going wrong

3. Traceability System – the more accurately you can identify an defective batch of products the more you can limit the risk with minimal impact on production. Set up simple records that can link ingredients and critical preparation processes (such as baking) to specific batches. Label your raw materials and final products so you can trace problems back to the source. Start with a simple system based on day of production then refine it down to shifts or even batches as your experience grows.

for more information about Food Traceability checkout our earlier post on Tracing the Foodsteps

Food Traceability

Food Traceability : Tracing the footsteps

In the recent years food safety incidents and food scares have been increasing and consumer confidence dwindling. Recent food scares have demonstrated that the identification of the origin of food and feed is of prime importance for the protection of consumers. The recent case in the US of Salmonella in peanuts resulted in over 300 product recalls, but an interesting factor was that these recalls took place over a 3 month period, indicating that it took many weeks for some suppliers to realise that their products contained peanuts from the contaminated batches.

A food traceability system enables us to follow the movement of any food product by documentation through each point of food handling. When an incident occurs, the food traceability system could assist in the recall of the food products in question and assist in the investigation of the cause. Also transmitting and verifying the relevant information would contribute to increasing reliability on the information of the label, and thus enable consumers to purchase food with a sense of security.

In 1700 BC, Mesopotamian shepherds marked animals with different colours and in the 7th century, Chinese used tattoos to identify the breed of horses. In 1875, US livestock were marked with tags.

This article written by our Technical Head Muralikrishna Bujji has been recently published by Food & Beverage News October 16-31 2009 issue.