The noted microbiologist Mansour Samadpour has recently suggested to Bloomberg’s Stephanie Armour that (See Bill Marler’s blog) 

“You can make these audits useful by writing them on toilet paper. Then someone would at least use them,” said Mansour Samadpour, president of Lake Forest Park, Washington-based IEH Laboratories and Consulting Group, a food-safety consulting firm, in an interview. “They’re worthless. They give a false sense of security.”

 

http://www.marlerblog.com/legal-cases/the-best-quote-ever/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+MarlerBlog+(Marler+Blog

 

Are third party audits currently useless to buyers and to the supplier who pays for them?

 

I think we need to clarify how the buyers can best use these reports, and how to improve the reporting process rather than throwing stones at one another…no one is shatterproof.

 

Understand that assuring food safety in the fresh produce supply chain is very different in many ways from assuring the safety of the meat, poultry, dairy or other food industries, most of which are highly regulated.

 

Currently, there are some alternatives to the independent third party risk assessment on farms, but those solutions are a ways off. Some state regulators are focusing in on the agricultural sector, but today the regulation and enforcement of food safety standards is left to the industry.

 

The “food safety industry” is quite competitive and diverse; private labs compete for market share against auditing firms with labs, auditing firms compete with other auditing firms, standard setting and certification bodies compete, pest control services also compete with chemical suppliers who also own auditing firms.

 

Therefore, understanding what is being said by firms like IEH Laboratories and Consulting Group about its competitors requires some retrospection.

 

The testing of agricultural products for safety by labs today is not routine. However, as this trend grows we may eventually see a produce firm that "has passed a Lab test" involved in an outbreak just as we have seen raw meat facilities that have passed government inspection and laboratory analysis involved.

 

I would like to ask Mr. Mansour if he would be just as critical of labs for giving a "false sense of security" when the products they test cause outbreaks? Is USDA inspection worthless if inspected products cause outbreaks?

 

It is clear to me that third party audits are needed in the absence of any other outside controls of primary producers at this time. The produce industry, together with the food safety industry that supports it, should consider the following soft spots in this process: 

  • Audits are routinely announced, meaning that the time of the audit is known ahead of time by all parties. An auditing firm that conducts both announced and unannounced audits reports that the differences in the score between the two measures can be 10 percentage points or more. Risk based inspections do not necessarily require unannounced visits as the risk in a process can usually be determined from operations, but at least some announced audits are a good idea. 
  • Buyers currently are empowered by their customers to go outside the recognized certified sellers if product is needed. The pool of unregulated and unsupervised facilities is still large. It is not uncommon to have an audited, certified and even inspected produce operation, operating beside an unregulated unaudited firm. Inconsistencies like that cause animosity and dysfunction.  

·         The pressure on buyers, especially brokers and other middlemen to buy from anyone, results in placing some operations in a competitive disadvantage. There is no clear answer to this as some operations just simply ignore the requirements that others must follow and can still sell their products. 

  • The standards the third parties use are written by the buyers. These are also the entities that evaluate the findings, and make buying decisions supposedly based on conformance to their standard. Buyers cannot raise the bar so high as to eliminate a large share of the supply chain and thus develop those standards so as to be inclusive of the current levels of sanitation and safety in the industry- which can be less than perfect. I have not seen yet where a low score on an audit has caused an operation to go out of business. An outbreak will do this, but not a low or even failing score. In today’s market, if the supplier has needed product, the volume and the physical quality, he will be able to sell it to a customer somewhere with our without a passing grade, even with or without an audit of any type. 
  • Retailers and their own culture effect food safety audit systems in produce.

I was in a well-known market the other day and saw next to the open bin of cracked and otherwise damaged mixed tree nuts (with no traceability), bags of packed nuts, clean and unbroken with source codes. The bagged nuts were about 50% more expensive.

Rather than using audit reports for toilet paper, buyers should instead be using them to make decisions and all involved in the private assurance of produce food safety systems should read the writing on their own wall.