Courting Disaster - Part II

Ongoing food recalls prompts an action plan and a call to action.

By
Joanna Cosgrove
Online Editor

In May, Nutraceuticals World published an online exclusive about the epidemic of adulterated foods. Five months have passed, and sadly, not much has changed. Despite all of the talk about enacting more stringent legislation, tainted foods are still being recalled - to the ire of consumers across the nation.

With an emphasis on prevention, the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) testified before the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health last week regarding its proposal to improve the safety of imported food and urged Congress to adopt its Commitment to Consumers: The Four Pillars of Imported Food Safety, a proposal centered on more industry responsibility and enhanced U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversight and enforcement.

GMA president and CEO Cal Dooley outlined GMA’s comprehensive proposal designed to protect consumers by strengthening, modernizing and improving the system governing food imports. According to GMA, the biggest issue facing the present safety of imported food and food ingredients is a lack of focus on prevention. “We will never be able to inspect our way to a safer food supply,” said Scott Openshaw, spokesperson for GMA. “Risk-based prevention and inspection is the key to imported food safety and our proposal (which we have laid out before Capitol Hill) we believe is the best approach.”

Under the first pillar, all U.S. importers of record would be required to adopt a foreign supplier quality assurance program and verify that imported ingredients and products meet FDA food safety and quality requirements. The program would be based on FDA guidance and industry best practices, and would be monitored and enforced by the FDA.

The second pillar of the proposal outlines a “qualified importer” program that allows importers to provide additional data to assist FDA in targeting resources toward imports that are likely to present foreseeable risks and away from those that are known to be in compliance. U.S. importers of record would share test results, data and supply chain information with the FDA in a confidential manner. Qualifying products and ingredients would receive expedited treatment at the borders, allowing the FDA to train its resources on products that pose a greater potential risk.

The third pillar focuses on building capacity within foreign governments so that as products move around the world there is a greater assurance of safety and quality.

Finally, recognizing that FDA must be armed with the appropriate resources to administer this program and adequately fulfill its food safety mission, the fourth pillar seeks to expand the capacity of FDA, by providing the Agency with the resources it needs to get the job done.

“We believe that the adoption of our four pillars is by far the best way to strengthen our nation’s food safety net and bolster consumer confidence in the safety, security and quality of the food supply,” Mr. Dooley explained. “By focusing our efforts on prevention – and by expanding and improving our ability to detect threats – we believe that our proposal will do far more to ensure the safety and quality of imported foods and ingredients than the adoption of the majority of the proposals outlined in the Food and Drug Import Safety Act of 2007.”

Gauging Consumer Confidence

While the long-term effect of the current food recalls on consumer attitudes remains to be seen, a recent study from the International Food Information Council (IFIC), Washington, D.C., seems to indicate that the current consumer climate for safety hasn’t been irrevocably affected.

In a recent survey on consumer familiarity and overall impression of food biotechnology, the notion of confidence in the U.S. food supply was also examined.According to IFIC’s Jeff Strei, spokesperson and director of media relations, overall confidence in the food supply “remained at a high level with 69 percent of Americans indicating they were ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ confident in the food supply compared to 72 percent last year. However, the number of Americans selecting ‘very confident’ decreased from 21 percent in 2006 to 15 percent this year.”

The study also reported that 25 percent of Americans cited no particular food safety concern. Of the three-quarters of respondents who listed a specific food safety concern, disease and contamination topped the list at 38 percent; however, the biggest increase was in the “source” category, where concern about country of origin caused this category to rise from six percent of those citing a specific concern with the food supply in 2006 to 20 percent this year.

And, knock wood, even though the supplement industry hasn’t been affected, George Pontiakos, president and CEO of BI Nutraceuticals, Long Beach, CA, says the odds are very good that the supplement industry could fall victim to the same recall and tainted product problems handicapping the rest of the consumer goods industry. “It’s a very real possibility (although) it’s been somewhat discounted by the supplement industry overall, until the Menu Foods situation developed, then Colgate, Mattel and Goodyear, etc. All of a sudden people started to look at China as the problem, but it’s not so much a geographical problem, it’s a sourcing problem,” he said.

Mr. Pontiakos said the problem could be distilled down to a company taking personal responsibility. “We’ve invested in a very strong laboratory capability, our own botanists, laboratory technicians check everything for heavy metals and pesticides, etc., to give us a high level of confidence that we know the quality of product coming into our receiving dock,” he said. The company also has a facility in Suzhou, China, staffed with its own people, its own laboratory, its own sourcing effort and a vendor surveillance program that provides a chain of custody that spans from the grower to the facility to the customer to assure there is nothing adulterated.

The company also invested in a BI-specific process called Protexx HP that enables it to sterilize some 700 product species to exactly the right profile before it enters the mill. The company’s Identilok process also lab-guarantees identification down to the botanical’s specific marker compound.

Mr. Pontiakos believes the supplement industry needs to undergo a “sea change” with regard to its procurement philosophies. “This industry has historically purchased via price, relying on a vendor’s certificate of analysis, but if you have a vendor who’s lacking in integrity, they’ll put whatever you want on the certificate of analysis,” he said, adding that if a company anchors its reputation to its certificate of analyses it is courting problems. “There’s a lot of this ostrich head-in-the-sand type behavior going on and you get what you pay for. If your procurement people are measured on purchase price variants, then you’re going to get hurt. If your not measuring your procurement people on total cost of quality – the cost of a rejection, rework, a line down condition, a recall – if you’re saving a nickel a kilo by going through some broker with a fax machine and your getting bonused or incentivized [sic] on that, it’s not sustainable.”

The increased paranoia about product safety is a good thing, said Mr. Pontiakos, who said it’s compelled his senior mangers to want to know more about their own company vendors and the nature of their business relationships. “Because of the recalls from marquis companies, you’re starting to see a lot more recognition of ‘maybe it’s not alright to buy from people who don’t have this investment already,’” he said.

Mr. Pontiakos concluded by asserting that the problem doesn’t rest solely with China and the supplement industry must initiate its own system of checks and balances. “The people who are buying this stuff are the ones enabling the behavior. If you want it cheap, you’ll get it cheap, but with that comes the liability of the discrepant or non-conformant product,” he said. “The industry should be able to police itself. There are no bigger experts than us. If we can’t get it under control, than we deserve the scrutiny we get from our non-ownership.”