Origin

Consumers are becoming ever-more alert to the origin and quality of their food. They are increasingly choosing organic, a market segment which is growing so rapidly that it can no longer be called a ‘niche’.

And whenever we talk about quality, the topics of food safety and food fraud immediately pop into my head – unfortunately, because food all too often makes the headlines for the wrong reasons. There’s no such thing as 100%-safe food. As a company, it’s your job to produce food as well as possible and as safely as possible. That can only be done when you have complete control over the hygiene and cleaning.

A supplier of cleaning agents is no longer just a middleman. Instead, such suppliers proactively advise their customers and apps have been developed to increasingly optimise the communication and control on the work floor. Their service offering continues to grow. All the information is available at the right moment in time so that you can respond to a calamity immediately.

But there is still a human factor involved, and unfortunately humans can’t always be trusted. It’s a hot topic in the world of politics: food fraud is unacceptable! The Netherlands Food and Consumer Product Safety Authority (NVWA) is working on tightening up on monitoring and enforcement. We’re getting a new Advisory and Investigation service (NVWA-IOD) which will be focused on organised crime that damages the integrity of food and poses a danger to food safety, because you could unwittingly become a victim of such criminals. That’s also the reason that we collaborated with LabelCompliance/Riskplaza to organise an afternoon session on risk assessment in relation to food fraud. It was a very interesting programme and we learnt a lot about preventing risks.

But the fact remains: there’s no such thing as 100% safe.