being done by the Food Standards Agency and DEFRA to ensure that all Elliott’s recommendations are met?
There was also no comment in response to Elliott’s stark warning. Instead the BHA offered a three-paragraph “food security update” published in its summer newsletter. This stated that the association “remains active with the FSA and DEFRA to support the expansion of their Food Crime Unit” and that it is “working with the FSA to support the growth of their technical response and industry communication functions to ensure we as a greater community are well prepared should we face a food crime or threat or food emergency”.
Is that enough? Given his concerns, Elliott remains to be convinced. “What worries me more than anything else is that the people making money from food fraud that see these efforts being made in one area will change tack and move on to another.”
One industry observer suggests the BHA approach was less proactive than others, not least when it came to coordinating an industry-wide effort to gather intelligence and improve what the scandal exposed as a porous and complicated supply chain in some cases.
Elliott’s report suggested: “The food industry must above all else demonstrate that having a safe, high-integrity food system for the UK is their main responsibility and priority.” A number of major foodservice players were found to have horse meat in their supply chains but there is precious little publicly available information about what any foodservice operator affected by the scandal has done since.
The British Retail Consortium, which counts some foodservice companies among its number, has encouraged its members to bare all. “Maintaining the trust of the customer is critical to the long-term survival of any retailer in the age of mass information,” its director general, Helen Dickinson, wrote in a blog earlier this year. “Key to keeping that trust is making sure the business is as transparent and open as possible. It should come as no surprise, that the most successful retailers are those which make transparency a top priority, both in times of crisis when something does go wrong and also, crucially, in the ordinary course of business.”
There is no shortage of polls showing just how far trust levels fell on the back of the horse-meat scandal. This time last year Populus found that 32% weren’t confident that the food they bought contained exactly what was on the ingredients list. What’s more, 55% were worried that a fraud incident could happen again.
Twelve months on it’s unclear whether the foodservice sector has begun clawing back some of this trust. Equally unclear is what the industry has done to make sure there isn’t another scandal. What commodity might the criminals target next? “It’s really difficult to pick,” says Elliott, but it tends to be products sold in “high volumes or for high prices. Herbs and spices are incredibly vulnerable,” he adds, undoubtedly as another warning for the foodservice sector.
