Lock Out Food Supply Threats

Sorrells says that one of a company’s biggest critical nodes is often its most obvious: the front door. “One of the worst security scenarios I’ve seen is a facility where there was absolutely no access control. You pulled up to the parking lot of a public facility, literally walked through the door and were in the production area within 30 seconds. That’s got some obvious vulnerabilities.”

Les Glowka, vice president of quality assurance at Quantum Foods in Chicago, doesn’t disagree, but city ordinance doesn’t allow his company to install perimeter fencing, so the frozen meat product business mounted surveillance cameras on the sides of the building, near doorways, and on the roof. To control access, Quantum also installed fingerprint scanners and magnetic card readers throughout the facility. “Now, it’s pretty much like a locked-down building with an invisible 20-foot wall around the building,” Glowka says.

Sometimes companies believe they’re doing what they must to address a critical node but end up causing other safety problems. During her research for Safe Food, Nestle visited one meat packing plant that was trying very hard to make its safety procedures work, including upgrading its ovens so that operators could raise the temperature of a particular meat product to 165ºF—enough to kill “pretty much everything.” But the company then removed the meat and left it out in the open air for several hours to cool.

“I asked the man who was giving me a tour of the plant if he was worried about the product becoming re-contaminated, and his response was, ‘We’ve tested it, and we don’t have any problem,’” Nestle says. “Three weeks later, the company had a problems with Listeria.”

The founders of Homemade Baby, an organic/kosher baby food manufacturer in Culver City, Calif., didn’t leave anything to chance when they put their business together in 2005. “Knowing that no one had ever made and commercially sold fresh baby food before, we wanted to make sure we did everything right,” says Theresa Kiene, Homemade Baby’s chief executive officer. “We found Melissa Calicchia, one of the world’s most renowned microbiologists, who was interested in what we were trying to do and helped put some of our safety systems in place. Her name turned out to be like an American Express Gold card: Soon, my husband and I were able to surround ourselves with people who were a lot smarter than we were about the short- and long-term precautions and preparations we needed to make.”

AMI hosts periodic Strategic Partnership Program on Agroterrorism meetings at member facilities, which include group CARVER plus shock vulnerability assessment exercises and discussion, Seward says. Entities such as the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Food and Drug Administration, and state and local law enforcement can also interact with AMI about potential safety issues. “This gives people who are not in our industry a better idea of what goes on in our industry,” Seward says. “That way, these groups are better equipped to make judgments about what’s likely to happen.”

Testing, Testing …

Microbial testing is the backbone of any food safety effort—just ask officials at Earthbound Farm. Supplying packaged produce to 75% of all U.S. supermarkets, Earthbound launched its new four-level “test-and-hold” system in October 2006, a few weeks after an E. coli outbreak traced to its bagged spinach product killed three people and sickened more than 200 others.

The company had a product testing system in place prior to the outbreak, but it wasn’t effective enough, according to Mike Daniels, Earthbound Farm’s vice president of food safety and organic integrity. “When this happened to us, it wasn’t, ‘Gee, it’s a numbers game, and now we’re going to be okay for the next 22 years of processing.’ It was, ‘This is not good. We’ve produced an unhealthy product, and that’s not what we want to be associated with. Let’s figure out how to make this product safer.’”