If It’s Not Safe, It’s Not Food

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that each year, 48 million Americans get sick from a foodborne illness; 128,000 are hospitalized; and 3,000 die. This is a significant public health burden that the food industry, including the retail sector, is taking steps to prevent. Besides continuing to make sure that their food was safe from foodborne illnesses, food retailers over the past year had the added responsibility of keeping their employees and customers safe from COVID-19. To ensure that they didn’t compromise on food safety, retailers collaborated with manufacturers, suppliers, the agriculture industry, governments and many others to help maintain a safe food supply during a heavily disrupted time. Some of the top food retailers recently came together for the virtual GFSI Conference, the premier annual event of the Global Food Safety Initiative, part of The Consumer Goods Forum, to share their approaches to ensuring the safety of their food operations during the past year. Predicting Food Safety Risk Published last year, U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s A New Era of Smarter Food Safety Blueprint emphasizes embracing predictive analytics to help find the root causes of problems and avoid identified risks. When thinking about predicting food safety risk, Carletta Ooton, VP product assurance, risk and security at Seattle-based Amazon, points out that there are three factors to consider. “The first is ensuring the predictive models used are actually accurate,” says Ooton. “With predictive modeling, Amazon is able to calculate lowest-risk predictions before the first units are shipped. It allows us to remove potentially harmful products before customers can get them, which gives us confidence in the billions of items we have in our catalogue. The second is speed — the notion around how do we take the action proactively before it negatively impacts customers, and are we doing it fast enough? Speed matters when it comes to food safety. The third is, are we getting smarter? Are we continuously retraining our models to maintain that high performance, but are we also improving that high performance and further driving accuracy for customers?” Amazon’s Customer Feedback Monitoring program allows Amazon to listen to customer reviews, customer return comments, questions and answers, and customer service department contact, all of which help drive its food safety and compliance processes across all product lines. “We have models that are monitoring and analyzing continuously more than 67 million pieces of feedback every week,” says Ooton. “We take the appropriate actions based on that reactive feedback standpoint. We use that data to train our predictive models so they get even better. We use machine learning to calculate the relative distance between the products that we sell and any products that we ever received a safety related concern [about]. Where there is a positive correlation, we can predict the severity of a potential issue and the likelihood of similar occurrences. We treat a prediction from the data as an actual action that something has happened. We don’t treat them any differently than a signal that was embedded in an actual piece of feedback. That’s the power of the data.” How far in advance can predictive analytics be used? Ooton notes that she was able to use predictive analytics to find a trend on an item before the product was recalled weeks in advance. She has confidence that predictive analytics has the potential to be used even further. Food Safety Compliance At the height of the pandemic, food retailers had to implement increased routine cleanings, many of which are still in place today. This includes sanitizing high touchpoints like doors, plexiglass shields and carts to prevent the spread of COVID-19. This intense scrutiny over cleaning protocols, which are also vital to food safety, has pushed compliance issues to the forefront. More often than not, poor safety compliance is linked to employees not fully understanding the importance of certain practices. For example, when consumers touch contaminated shopping carts and baskets, they can spread the pathogens and germs they pick up to anything they put in their carts – or pick up to examine and then put back on the shelf. For fresh fruits and vegetables or items that aren’t cooked before eating, this increases the risk of consumers ingesting these dangerous germs. “Food safety compliance is generally expected by customers,” says Caroline Easterbrook, Amazon’s head of food safety for Europe, Middle East and Africa. “You don’t get bonus points for not harming somebody.” As Sara Mortimore, VP, global food safety at Bentonville, Ark.-based Walmart Inc., points out, education is an investment worth making to ensure a committed workforce. “We’ve done a whole bunch of things this year, like augmented-reality headsets for training and a ton of messaging, like posters,” observes Mortimore. “We also used a lot of videos that are very short, very immediate, teaching people how to do something, why we do it, making it very relevant to people. We recognize that food safety culture is incredibly important.” Walmart is also trying to keep compliance simple. For instance, its Bring Your Own Device Program enables some of its operative associates to use their own devices to analyze compliance data, with no additional high-tech, labor-intensive instrumentation needed. Mortimore also stresses keeping the lines of communication open with Walmart’s essential workers when it comes to training. Associates sometimes have a better notion of how to make compliance easier and may have suggestions on better safety protocols, since they’re on the front lines and know what procedures work and which don’t. Meanwhile, when home chefs grew weary of cooking meals during lockdown, many turned to meal kits like those from HelloFresh. To ensure the safety of its in-demand products, HelloFresh increased hygiene processes and hired additional quality assurance teams to keep its food safety procedures from being disrupted. “We’ve learned we can deliver more while still ensuring that food safety is not compromised,” says Janet Cox, associate director of food safety and compliance at Berlin-based HelloFresh. Keeping the Supply Chain Safe Last year, food retail had to become more agile to keep food safe while the supply chain was in flux. “When the pandemic was biting and stores were empty, we kept it safe,” asserts Howard Popoola, VP of corporate food technology and regulatory compliance at The Kroger Co., in Cincinnati. “We deserve to give ourselves a pat on the back.” At Minneapolis-based Target, Tony Heredia, SVP, compliance and ethics, credits the strong relationships that the retailer has with its vendors to ensure that they understood its food safety standards. “Whether it’s fresh or processed foods, we tell them right up front, at the point of sourcing, what our expectations are going to be,” he explains. “We also have specialized teams who go out to the fields or production facilities and meet personally with the growers or producers to help them understand what our expectations are, what we look for and how we can help them meet those expectations as early in the process as possible.” Once product enters its facilities, Target relies on technology. “We check temperature logs to make sure it was never out of the temperature threshold,” says Heredia. “We double-check those temperature logs with a physical, certified calibrated probe, and then we immediately invoke it into our own control facilities, whether it’s ambient-cooled or frozen food, within specific standards and temperature thresholds.” Specialists in the distribution warehouses determine how long product can stay within the facility before quality deteriorates. “It’s a very complicated model between understanding consumer trends, making real-time adjustments to our forecast models, but then equipping the specialists in those buildings, who manage both safety and quality and minimize waste, with the tools they need to understand on a daily basis when we might have more days of product in a facility than we think we can sell, given our current observations of sales trends and consumer patterns,” says Heredia. When product arrives in its more than 1,800 stores, Target empowers its food specialists with localized control. They can monitor how much product they have on hand, whether they’re getting too much or too little based on their localized consumer trends, and accelerate velocity through promotions or special offers. This is done through Target’s personalization technology to ensure that the product is usable before quality and safety concerns set in. Meanwhile, Canadian supermarket chain Loblaw Cos. Ltd. was able to avoid major supply chain disruption during the pandemic, due to its well-structured crisis management team that worked with senior-level executives, enabling fast decisions. Strong relationships with industry associations and authorities also helped the retailer take proactive steps in a timely manner. Vaneska Mattos VP, food safety, quality assurance and regulatory affairs for Brampton, Ontario-based Loblaws, also cites GFSI certification in helping the retailer secure the safety of its food supply chain. Loblaws sources products from across the globe, so proper certification is key to ensure food safety. “Our program is heavily GFSI-based,” notes Mattos. “The POs are GFSI-based, so if a vendor is late on their GFSI certification, we can’t buy from that vendor. GFSI certification is critical for us.” Gillian Kelleher, VP of food safety and quality assurance at Rochester, N.Y.-based Wegmans Food Markets Inc., agrees that the certification has played a key role in maintaining food safety throughout the pandemic. “We see GFSI as a best practice,” affirms Kelleher. “We fully embrace it for Wegmans suppliers.” PG GIVE FOOD SAFETY A HAND Although each type of food retail has its own food safety issues as well as risk management options, good hygiene and sanitation practices are important in all food sector activities. Viruses like norovirus, the most common cause of foodborne illness in the United States, are often first transmitted in retail food and foodservice establishments via employees’ hands to surfaces like restroom doors or faucet handles. Viruses are then transmitted to other employees when they touch these common surfaces, which then leads to cross contamination of food, even in situations where the food handler is wearing gloves. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cross contamination is a major contributing factor to foodborne outbreaks in retail food establishments. Hal King, Ph.D., managing partner at Active Food Safety and founder of Public Health Innovations, both based in Atlanta, emphasizes frequent and proper hand hygiene as a major aspect of any food safety plan. This includes mandating frequent handwashing with soap and water for 20 seconds or longer for employees handling food, providing handwashing stations with soap and water for guests and employees, and providing alcohol-based hand sanitizers to guests and employees when soap and water aren’t available. Additionally, while cleanliness matters to grocery store customers, it’s also essential to food safety. King recommends that retailers should continue elevating their sanitation practices post-pandemic, including disinfecting common touchpoints that can harbor bacteria and viruses, like restrooms, door handles/entrances, conveyor belts, and shopping carts and baskets. Product choice matters as well – when possible, choose science-based products with short kill claims for eliminating targeted organisms. And as always, make sure that sick employees stay home to help stop the spread of germs and foodborne illness. PG

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