Food Safety: once again a cultural matter
Food Safety Culture
A customer returned a product to a food company (a manufacturer of fresh products) because it contains a metal object. This customer luckily noticed it in time and could prevent worse implications. But how did this object end up in a product whose production line includes metal detection? Could this be a matter of sabotage? What now? It happened to one of our members.
The company starts an investigation. They can soon rule out the production process. Based on the product in question and its package and transport, the return containers become their prime suspect. Apparently, the internal dishwasher had already been broken for quite some time and only the extremely dirty containers were cleaned externally.
During a previous delivery someone must have left the foreign object in one of the containers, where it remained unnoticed and consequently got mixed up in this (fresh) product during the next shipment…
3 tips!
- Giving advice in the event of curious complaints.
- Providing trainings about incident awareness.
- Organizing a Members’ Meeting about ‘Security & Food Safety’ on 4 October 2018. In order to discuss this theme from various angles, we would like to introduce experts such as Dr. Elien De Boeck, who dedicated her PhD to this subject. Moreover, we would like to offer an interactive and instructive session by using real cases of fellow food companies.
Learning points
What to do when a consumer reacts in an unexpected way?
What do you do when faced with an unexpected response? How do you prepare your consumer service for the unexpected?
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