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The food industry shook to its foundations when the HACCP requirement was introduced in 1995. Now, 25 years later, we can say that our food has become very much safer. "In the early 1990s it was raining recalls," looks back at Paul Besseling, food safety expert at Précon Consulting Group. "But I sometimes think: aren't we overshooting the mark?" Besseling looks back and looks ahead in this interview with VMT.
Besseling can be called a guru in the world of food safety (see box below). This year he has been with Précon for 25 years, just as long as the HACCP requirement has existed. That it was a completely different time he illustrates with an example from his own career. "Before I started at Précon, I worked as a technologist in a dairy. There I was personally involved in an incident in the early 1990s. A few hundred packages had been filled with disinfectant liquid (hydrogen peroxide) instead of chocolate milk."
"A cleaning program had started and that should not have happened. They were also, nota bene, children's drinking cartons with such a straw on the side. We found out that this error could only occur around the holidays when we made the chocolate milk on one day and didn't fill up until the next day. Usually, it was filled on the same day. Unfortunately, the error was only discovered during consumption. Those children were shocked. One child went to the outpatient clinic, but was fortunately able to return to school after some reassuring words. After all, 0.2 percent hydrogen peroxide is also used as a mouthwash. Not a public health hazard, but very unpleasant."
"Yes, of course I myself felt that something terrible had happened. But this kind of incident used to happen more often. For example, at that time there was also an incident with baby food. First there was a story about a disinfectant in the product, then later an issue with glass particles. That was in the news for several weeks. And then we came up with our chocolate milk. If you ask me about the difference between 25 years ago and now: back then it rained issues. I kept a scrapbook, I could paste something new in there every week. Our colleague, Theo Appelhof, director at the Food Inspection Department from 1986 to 2005, can certainly attest to that."
"True, it was really different then. I gave a lot of training even then. Then I would talk about different types of infections and ask people for examples. They tumbled over each other and before you knew it, you had a flipchart full of writing. Austrian wine, frozen vegetables, baby food... If I ask nowadays, they have to think for a long time. In that sense, food safety has advanced tremendously, especially thanks to the HACCP requirement of 1995. Companies had to start thinking for themselves about the safety of their products. And with the advent of the General Food Law in 2002, responsibility for food safety also came very clearly to companies."
"The great thing is that HACCP is a legal requirement, but the industry has taken this up very proactively. Industry has started certifying, creating a completely new world of consultants who specialize in food safety. In the dairy industry, I once took a course on ISO 9001 in the late 1980s. Quality management was really emerging at that time. Then food safety certification also took off. Précon grew up with that. We were the very first consulting firm on the subject. By now, every food company has its own quality manager."
"Well, of course I find food safety very interesting and socially extremely important, but sometimes I do wonder: aren't we overshooting the mark? There are new requirements all the time. In the basic document for food safety, from the Codex Alimentarius, there are some 250 to 300 requirements. If you look at the private standards, you quickly exceed 500. If you look at what customers sometimes impose on their customers, it is sometimes more than a thousand requirements. And that includes issues such as fraud, food defense and sustainability. Companies sometimes complain about the regulatory pressure from the government, but they can do a lot themselves. As a result, quality managers are incredibly busy making sure they are compliant. Our focus should be more on the production floor, because after all, that is where the safety of the products is ultimately determined."
"More and more. Because of all kinds of incidents, we want to take fewer and fewer risks and less and less is possible. We fuse all threats. But you can also choose to take a certain risk. We do the same in other areas, don't we? There are 600 to 700 traffic deaths a year. If we lowered the speed limit further, that number could be drastically reduced. But we don't do that because we like to drive smoothly. There are between 20 and 100 fatalities per year in the Netherlands due to unsafe food, and yet we are getting stricter. For small entrepreneurs with new initiatives, it's getting harder and harder."
"It has a lot to do with the confusion between risk analysis and incident assessment. If we do an assessment that a certain risk will occur once in the next ten years, we can accept it. But the moment it happens, everyone shouts that it is unacceptable. But that is a completely different assessment. This is often mixed up in HACCP. Then someone shouts "consumers can die from that!" Yes, anything can. You can choke on a piece of licorice. Then we shouldn't eat licorice anymore, right? No, because it's all about opportunity. And about the so-called "beneficial effect." We eat filet americain. Link stuff, hefty risk, why eat it? Because we like it. Then we think the beneficial effect is greater than the
Also look at risk management in other industries, such as aviation, Besseling believes. "HACCP is okay, but it could be better. HACCP sometimes seems like a language battle with endless discussions about definitions. While it's simply about understanding causes and effects. I myself am a fan of the Bow Tie approach, I have learned a lot from it. Moreover, that approach is compatible with other risk assessments, such as ARBO and environment."
"An important learning point: risk analysis is different from incident assessment. You assess an incident when it occurs, the probability plays no role then. Risk analysis is all about the probability of such an incident occurring. We have to estimate it and that is very difficult. In quality management we like to say "to measure is to know", but in risk management you often don't know everything. So in ISO 31000 we say that risk is the effect of uncertainty. To deal with that uncertainty is difficult, but within your responsibility as a QA'er that is very important to realize. If something goes wrong, you should not allow yourself to be blamed. If you do your job well, management is aware of the risks that are there. As a QA person, you have to be able to explain which investments will yield the most safety gains. They are responsible for the choices. And even if they are small, there are risks in the things we eat. But stopping eating, there are even bigger risks with that."
On the risk matrix Précon uses, "We sometimes get criticism on this, people think it's too green. Acrylamide in boiled eggs? You really don't need to pay attention to that. And you won't find a herring worm in a currant bun. And you won't get covid-19 from things you eat. Those hazards are in the "zero chance" column. An important step in HACCP is to determine which hazards are not in column "zero," with those hazards you have to work on. We also deliberately choose a period of one hundred years. Deaths or hospitalizations cannot be completely ruled out but if you can make a plausible case that your product will not cause that to happen in the next hundred years, then you're just doing it right. QA'ers find it difficult to look at such a long period, but an assessment about the safety of a product for the next two years is really far too short."
Want to know more about HACCP or need help with your HACCP plan? You can call us at +31 (0)30 - 65 66 010 or email info@precongroup.com. We also offer training in the field of HACCP. Check out our training page.
This article was published on vmt.com.
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