What has been your main involvement in food safety professionally?
I am a great believer in getting involved in issues that affect the food industry and trying to ensure that my voice, and that of the Associations that I represent, is heard. I play an active role as a member in the Food & Drink 
Federation (FDF), chairing both the ‘FDF Food Safety and Scientific Steering Group’ and the ‘FDF Emerging Issues and Incident Management Working Group’. I also chair the ‘British Oat and Barley Millers Association, Technical Committee’. I have a very strong interest and involvement in the development of regulatory issues.This has given me the opportunity to present at a number of International, European and UK Food Safety events, including giving three presentations at the recent EC Mycotoxin Forum, and hopefully to ensure that industry, and common-sense, views are loudly heard. Ultimately, if you are not in a position to be heard then your voice will be lost.
What advice would you give to someone starting to get involved with food safety management?
Curiosity is the single greatest skill that anyone starting out in the food industry can have. It should lead you to wanting to understand the history behind any subject, and then to question why things are done the way they currently are, and then what happens if you look at things from a different viewpoint. Curiosity will lead you to getting involved in a broad spectrum of food industry areas, even beyond those that you may actually be working in at any given time. This knowledge will pay dividends many times over later. I think the other real skill is to keep things simple. The world, and the food industry, are complicated enough. Take every opportunity to take the simple, common-sense route. You will be amazed how rare this is.
What do you think the key global food safety challenges are?
I think there are many conflicting pressures at the moment. We are, rightfully, seeing greater and greater emphasis on environmental and sustainability issues, but these often conflict with food safety issues.
A couple of examples:
- Within cereal crop management we are seeing a significant move to minimum, or nil, tillage seed drilling, to an increase in field edge boundaries, and to dramatically lower numbers of approved plant protection products. Whilst these are undoubtedly good for the environment, they are the direct opposite of what is needed for field level mycotoxin control.
- The current significant backlash against single-use plastics poses a number of challenges. Whilst I’m sure that the vast majority of us would welcome the elimination of much of the completely unnecessary plastic packaging found on many consumer goods, much of our food does require packaging of some sort. Paper/card is not suitable on its own for many foods, and there is a real environmental cost of paper recycling that is not even discussed. Recycled paper is generally not suitable for direct food contact applications, so we may use more virgin fibre, potentially collapsing the already fragile paper recycling industry. On many food products there is also growing regulatory pressure to include barriers to mineral oil or ink migration. This can be achieved with certain plastic laminates, but these are unfortunately not currently recycled.
These lead to some uncomfortable questions and some uncomfortable truths.As a society we need to realise we cannot ‘have our cake and eat it’. All of these issues can be resolved with appropriate research and development, but this will take much longer than any of us would like, and the societal demand for change is now.
What changes would you like to see with respect to an industry-wide approach to food safety management?
As manufacturers, to both retail and business-to-business, we are bombarded with audit after audit. We have had a number of occasions already this year where we have had two unannounced audits from different customers on the same day …
Auditing is only one aspect of supplier and product assurance but seems to be the one that most organisations fall back upon. The deficiencies with audits are many, and these are well documented. The failure of the British Retail Consortium (BRC) standards to rationalise audits, which it was set up to do, is spectacular. In my view we need to rapidly move to a far more coordinated system of supplier and product assurance. I am sure that auditing will play a part in any future assurance systems, but it must be coupled with better sharing of data, in a suitably confidential way, and with other assurance protocols. At the moment, a huge amount of resource, and a huge amount of money, is dedicated to sustaining a failing system that is simply not fit for purpose. We need to work together to devise a sensible system that provides real assurance, and reassurance, to all parts of the supply chain, including consumers.