The head of food safety at the World Food Programme (WFP) has shared the challenges of ensuring food is safe when working in remote areas and sourcing items locally.
Virginia Siebenrok, chief of food safety and quality at WFP, said in large food safety-related operations like the WFP, the work is mostly as risk managers.
“We need to find the right balance between the resources we have and how to employ them wisely. Science is our biggest tool to understand our food safety risks and assess our shortfalls,” she said during a webinar organized by Mars to mark World Food Safety Day.
“We usually operate in diverse and difficult environments, so science helps us from when we are working on producing safe food upstream, when we validate our heat-treatments at production level, and do testing and screening for mycotoxins in ingredients. We make use of rapid tests that enable fast movement of goods as speed is paramount for our operations.
“Being able to predict risks is an increasingly important factor, here science plays a big role. I can mention predictive models for aflatoxins and intelligence tools that map risks and likelihood of occurrence throughout food chains. Interpretation of this information is also important to help mitigate or prevent the risks. The possibility of doing many things remotely is a great asset, especially in hard to reach areas.”
Incident management
Siebenrok said the agency had worked with Mars on the investigation of food incidents to identify the root cause.
“We utilized Mars’ capacity on fingerprinting techniques. We decided to use mass spectrometry and liquid chromatography to help identify a contaminant in food which ended up being a type of tropane alkaloid, scopolamine, which was coming from jimson weed seeds,” she said.
“Another example is whole genome sequencing (WGS) of pathogens which enabled a greater understanding of the origin of some issues and how they could be inter-connected. Not so long ago, WFP started scaling up the procurement and delivery of canned foods, which are high risk. Mars supported us in developing standards for canned foods, especially on packaging design and manufacturing monitoring, and these helped us prevent any growth of anaerobic bacteria that can be very harmful if consumed.”
Siebenrok said she had learned not to discard any hypothesis when investigating incidents, because the root cause can be anywhere.
“Because we work in remote areas we need to think of having a Plan A, Plan B and Plan C to respond fast if we have issues. We need to build those plans into our supply chains so building capacity in locations for testing, retrieving data, and speaking to people. Once the food is with beneficiaries it is very difficult to perform a recall.”
When asked about food security and food safety, Siebenrok said one enables the other.
“WFP tries to buy as much food as we can locally. It’s expected that we run into some food safety concerns while doing that. As much as possible we have been trying to reach a balance between the two, never compromise on food safety but applying standards in a smart way and also sometimes advocating for a review of limits in Codex committees.”
View from Mars
Mars has partnered with WFP since 2015 on a range of food-related issues.
Pavlos Fragkopoulos, corporate quality director of sourcing at Mars, said industry is becoming better in horizon scanning for indications of emerging risks.
“By combining these insights, we are trying to clean up the noise because with all that data there is a lot of noise. We are looking to understand what is the true value of the insights that we are getting from the scanning. By having the right processes to evaluate, we are establishing an effective risk management process so we can manage the risks that we have identified. One of the big challenges is the more data we get, we get more lost, so it is important to bring the science behind the risk management so that we can focus on the areas that make sense for food safety and investing our resources so we can prevent the next incident,” he said.
Fragkopoulos said both Mars and WFP work with small and medium businesses in developing countries.
“How can we raise the bar of food safety in developing countries where suppliers are based for some of our commodities. WFP is an expert on this as the majority of their supplier base are in these countries and they are mostly sourcing local. We learnt how can we work with our suppliers to raise food safety awareness and help them evolve so we can also deliver safe food for the final product in Mars.”
Consumer expectation and awareness is also getting higher, said Fragkopoulos.
“We are digitalizing our material risk assessments so we can reduce the time it takes. Artificial intelligence is another tool, it is not the solution to everything and we need to understand that. We will continue needing human expertise and interpretation. There is a lot of information out there. We need to get better at segregating the noise from the actual threats.”
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