Survival Guide for Handling Food Recalls

Why was senior management unaware of the ingredient approval procedure and approved supply?

The senior manager charged with approving the material was not included in reviewing the ingredient approval procedure when it was updated and was not included in its distribution.

Food companies must ensure that there are appropriately trained resources available to perform root cause analysis, either on the recall team or available for consultation on short notice. It may be that the issue causing the recall has closed down the facility for investigation, and timing is critical. Using appropriate root cause analysis tools will help to find and resolve the issue much more quickly than a haphazard investigation. We can see from the example provided at left that root cause analysis rarely identifies one single cause of an incident, and it may take more than one action to prevent recurrence.

Testing may be part of finding the root cause of the recall; in preparation for this possibility, ensure that laboratories have been identified to perform testing, whether it be microbiological, toxicological, or foreign material analysis. If a food company does not have in-house expertise to fully interpret lab results, this is the time to call in an expert, and it is usually helpful to have an outside set of eyes assisting in the root cause analysis to identify areas that may have been missed.

Lessons Learned

Food companies should make time to debrief and review how the crisis was managed—what went well and what didn’t. Written recall procedures should be reviewed and updated to improve or better reflect the recall process. Any corrective actions identified from root cause analysis should be implemented, and team members should verify that they are working effectively.

Renata McGuire is project manager for food safety/resource material at the Guelph Food Technology Centre in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. She is responsible for providing food safety consulting services and for developing, maintaining, and upgrading the resource materials and consulting tools used for GFTC consulting projects. Her background is in toxicology, and she has extensive experience managing vendor audit programs, implementing a variety of HACCP and food safety programs, and managing product testing functions.