Food safety in industry-controlled animal produce

For centuries, management of animal production has been based on official controls, food security has been one of the main reasons to create and maintain a government based system. Wholesome food was needed not only for the general public but also for the armed forces and the labour force, and varied according to conditions within a specific region. During this time a structure of official controls was created and reached its goal to create a substantial and efficient supply of basic animal products, such as milk, meat and eggs.

Evolution in the structure of the food supply chain

Change, it is mentioned, is constant and the food industry, including the production of food of animal origin, has not been immune. Major changes in all stages of the supply chain are:
1. Increased scale of production from 1950 onwards;
2. Specialisation;
3. Globalisation, resulting in the transport/movement of all kinds of ingredients around the globe before final consumption.

This evolution will continue in production of food of animal origin in the near future, resulting in a global market of food items that are (almost) ready for consumption. Thus, for example the trade in eggs, raw milk and animal carcasses will become less dominant in favour of a global market for fresh and preserved dairy, egg and meat products. This again will have a major impact on the structure of the entire global supply chain of animal produce.

On the other hand large companies are active worldwide, and this is not limited to retailers and food service operators, but also processors of basic animal products such as dairy and meat. As a result of this globalisation of production and consumption many products are becoming more standardised in many aspects, such as price, quality and taste. The globalisation of production, processing and sales also shows the need for global access of all food constituents within the supply chain. Here again the local competent authority plays a role as trade in basic animal products is only possible when the authorities certify the safety of the products, the absence of animal diseases, and animal welfare within the whole supply chain in the region of production.

Basic rules within global trade are laid down in agreements of the WTO, and with respect to animal produce, references are made to OIE, FAO, WHO and Codex Alimentarius guidelines. These guidelines provide a solid basis for global trade, although the question remains as to how we deal with responsibilities between government and industry. Who is, and who should be addressed in the guidelines and in the resulting local legislation? This question is answered in several ways, thus resulting in different systems of control of animal production. It is obvious that regional culture, local structure of the industry, consumption habits and so on must have influence on a control system, thus resulting in an efficient regional structure. Within this structure the supply of regional products can be safeguarded without being overruled by overly complicated overriding directives. These local structures permit the production of local delicacies, such as cheese and meat products, without imposing risks to the common market. However a system that is not effective can hamper the industry far beyond its own borders, and one of the most striking examples in this respect is the UK food control system between 1980 and 1995 with regard to BSE. EU missions in the UK showed compliance levels with relevant rules in 1995, below 50%, thus showing that the production of food was not under control.

Codes of practices at each stage of the supply chain

During the past 25 years, tremendous developments have been realised with regard to clarification of all processes in animal production. This has resulted in codes of practice that apply to all stages of production. Examples at the farm level include AFS (Assured Farm Scheme, UK), QS (Qualität und Sicherheit, Germany) and IKB (Integrated Quality Control, The Netherlands). At slaughter and processing the main schemes are IFS, BRC and TQM as general quality schemes. ISO 9001 is used as a management scheme and HACCP is obligatory with respect to the content of food safety at slaughter and further food processing. The US and the EU have made HACCP mandatory through legislation for all types of food processing plants, although farms are excluded.

In 2000, the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) set out their mission and vision, stating:
The GFSI mission includes: strengthening consumers’ confidence in the food they buy in retail outlets; developing a simple set of rules for standards; creating harmony in the use of standards between all countries; and saving money for suppliers. These goals will bring benefits to all stakeholders: for consumers, in ensuring food safety, strengthening confidence and promoting awareness; for suppliers, in reducing the number of audits undertaken and improving overall efficiency; and for retailers, in developing simpler, better standards and supporting improved information flow and enforcement, thereby allowing suppliers to concentrate on product development. To achieve its objectives, GFSI has decided to implement a scheme to benchmark food safety standards for private label products, and develop an international information exchange system and a Good Retail Practices guide.

This initiative on the part of a group of international retailers has resulted in a new élan in developing and maintaining quality standards at a common level. By accepting the benchmark principle, it provides the possibility that various local standards have the ability to fulfil the general standards and to be recognised accordingly. This will result in standards that are global and local to be developed and maintained, and will have the broad support of producers and consumers whilst still enabling global trade.

One of the benchmark schemes is EurepGAP, which has thus created and implemented a series of sector-specific farm certification standards, with the aim of ensuring integrity, transparency and harmonisation of global agricultural standards. This includes the requirement for safe food that also respects worker health, safety and welfare, environmental and animal welfare issues. Local standards can be benchmarked and recognized as equivalent to EurepGAP.

These efforts from the producers and retailers have resulted in generally accepted standards. The next step is to realise an acceptable performance with respect to (for example) food safety and the linkage between legislation and industry-based quality systems. It is interesting to note that within the pharmaceutical industry the linkage between private quality systems and legislation is properly addressed, whilst in the food sector this clear distinction between supervision through the competent authority, and control based on the private system is still under construction. The new EU hygiene legislation and the USDA HIMP approach herald a new approach through the industry, but the practical realisation is still pending.

Harmonization of food control

In order to realize a fully industry-based quality control system within the supply chain of food of animal origin, a common understanding with respect to the implementation of rules is needed. Changing the perspective from an instrument-based legislation as in the traditional legislation, to a performance-based legislation, is absolutely necessary.

The first step in changing the structure should be a clear description of the minimum requirements needed, and this is seen in the new EU Hygiene Regulations and also in the US Hygiene rules. These new rules recognize firstly the responsibility of the supply chain with respect to food safety and animal health, and secondly provide the possibility to amend the rules based on scientifically sound observations.

Within the supply chain of animal produce, this new legislation creates the possibility to carry out a hazard analysis throughout the entire chain. These hazard analyses must be the basis of modern food safety control systems of dairy plants, meat processors and so on. The result of the hazard analyses for these companies will be, for example, that several, specifically mentioned hazards, such as salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes, Escherichia coli O157 and Campylobacter jejuni / coli will be recognized as relevant hazards in the supply chain, that need a high level of control; other hazards, such as Trichinella spiralis, Toxoplasma gondii, Mycobacterium avium, xenobiotica and mycotoxins also need control within the quality system, but are less relevant. This implies that the control level for the most relevant hazards need at least one CCP within the whole supply chain and others could be controlled with CP´s, or other less stringent measures.

In order to design a system for relevant hazards, information from human health databases is needed in order to show the frequency and severity of a disease in humans. Additionally information is needed concerning the prevalence of a specific hazard within the supply chain of a certain product. The latter should have a relationship towards disease in humans i.e. it should be related to, for example, the infectious dose. With the latter information the attributable factor of a hazard in a certain supply chain to human disease can be estimated. In order to obtain this information smart monitoring procedures are needed within the whole supply chain. For several hazards, such as Toxoplasma gondii and Mycobacterium avium, this information is currently lacking, thus new detection and monitoring methods based on sound epidemiological science need to be developed to provide this information.

Compliance with the standards applied

After a correct design of the HACCP plan, the execution of a scientifically justified HACCP plan is at present regularly hampered because of lack of consensus on compliance with the procedures. As long as private schemes and legislation do not allow a scientifically based consensus on what the relevant compliance with these standards must be, this item will not be addressed in a proper way. When not addressing the issue of compliance in a proper way it is uncertain what is happening, and an estimation of the effect of the correct execution of these standards on public health is impossible. When the final responsibility resides with the producers and the competent authority needs to carry out a supervision task, compliance rates and the resulting performance standards need to be addressed, otherwise the competent authority will end up defining instruments that state what must be applied, instead of stimulating the producers to reach certain food safety objectives.

Performance based private systems

Ultimately the industry is interested in the application of schemes and standards that can be controlled based on performance on relevant issues such as hazards. Additionally an instrument to steer the application of the schemes will be the compliance with the procedures. Currently there are several instruments that need to be developed in order to assess the level of performance of food safety systems and compliance rates. In newly developed food safety standards for meat and dairy the absence of certain hazards in the end product can easily be determined when the hazard is absent at the farm stage of the supply chain. In order to assess the absence of certain pathogens, such as salmonella in poultry, pork and beef, Trichinella spiralis in pork, Mycobacterium avium in pork and dairy and Toxoplasma gondii in pork and beef, the absence of antibodies at farm level can serve as an indicator to show the absence of these hazards at the farm level.

A pre-requisite to apply these tests will be that the farming conditions must be at a high hygienic level, and this implies that at least a relevant code of practice must be implemented including additional measures to cope with the specific hazards. When only a relevant code of practice is be applied and when sensitive analytical procedures to verify the absence of hazards are not applied, the system will ultimately collapse as it is not discriminating between those production systems that are on- and those which are off-specification.

The challenge for the near future with respect to industry implementation of successful food safety systems is to develop systems that are:
1. based on defined performance of the whole system with respect to food safety;
2. functioning according to schemes which are monitored daily, with compliances that are agreed upon with the local competent authorities;
3. verifying the level of food safety that is reached within the products. Intelligent analytic procedures need to be applied to show the absence of hazards in certain parts of the supply chain, such as at farm level. The pre-requisites for these analytical procedures are:
a. a direct relationship with the prevalence of the hazard in the product
b. it must be easy to carry out large numbers of tests within a short time span
c. the costs of these tests must be in balance with the production costs within large scale operations
d. a high sensitivity and specificity; this implies that high quality biologicals must be applied, and to keep the costs of the tests within reasonable limits re-use of the biologicals is preferable.

Currently the Animal Sciences Group of Wageningen University (The Netherlands), VION Food Group (Germany and The Netherlands), Biacore (Sweden), Xenosense (United Kingdom) and the Animal Health Service (The Netherlands) are developing a new generation of food safety systems in the pork supply chain with the instruments mentioned above. The basis of the analytical procedures applied is the surface plasmon resonance (biosensor) technology of Biacore. This technology allows the other partners to develop high quality tests on a chip that can be re-used at least 1000 times, thus allowing large scale testing at reasonable cost without compromising sensitivity and specificity. The consortium mentioned above has acquired the ‘Eureka’ status for the current project on pork safety. The project should realise tests to show the absence of salmonella, Trichinella spiralis and Mycobacterium avium at farm level of the pork supply chain.

Bert Urlings
Professor at Wageningen University, chair of Supply Chain Management in Animal Production
Director Quality and Environment, VION Food Group
Member of the Board of EurepGAP