Rob Wiersma is strategie-directeur voor de voedingsmiddelenindustrie bij Lawson Software. Rob schrijft regelmatig over ontwikkelingen en actuele thema's in de voedingsmiddelenindustrie.

If you’ve followed my periodic food safety commentaries on Lawson.com (tied to tomato scares and jalapeno scares among others), you’ve likely gotten a bit of a feel for my thoughts on food safety and other food-related topics. Well, we finally decided it might be time for me to share these thoughts on a more regular basis through a blog. This is a great opportunity and forum to share opinions and thoughts – and to interact with others in the business of food safety.

As you know, the food industry is a diverse collection of markets. Its complexity can boggle the mind. It faces many unique issues, including threats that can bring down a food company’s brand overnight, which was proven out most recenly in the case of salmonella-tainted peanuts. So this is a great place to talk about some of them and share some thoughts on how these may affect us all. It’s great dialogue, but we have to keep in mind that food safety can truly become a matter of life and death.

There is a lot of media attention on the food and beverage industry today – and it seems like a new food safety crisis jumps into the headlines every month or so. Trouble is, the industry needs better information on this topic – information on the causes, effects, and tools that are available today that can significantly speed time-to-detection and improve recall accuracy. This is information that goes beyond the media hype and focuses on what the industry can (and must) do about food contamination and food quality, broken supply chains, too much data and not enough knowledge, and how we can work together to solve some of these complexities.

Let’s face it, Peanut Corp of America saw its demise seemingly overnight. Its brand, and the brand names of its customers, bore the brunt of a (justifiably) terrified consumer population. Brand devastation is a very real consequence of poor decisions, lack of oversight and poor visibility into supply chains. Most frightening is the fact your brand may be at the mercy of some other company’s actions or decisions. This latest peanut scare underscores this fact. Leading peanut butter companies were suddenly scrambling to prove they weren’t linked to the salmonella scare. Schools, nursing homes and hospitals demanded immediate information from their food suppliers. Snack bar makers were forced to recall and destroy countless tons of product – much of which was likely perfectly safe.