Summary of the UK 2021 food report
FSA has released their annual food standards report reviewing food industry trends and changes after the pandemic and the Brexit, here are the impacts on your business:
Since the beginning of COVID-19, in conjunction with the departure from the EU, the UK’s food system was greatly affected in many aspects, including food and feed safety, restaurant compliance and imported food monitoring.
Every country possesses it’s own food safety standards, and has potential food dangers when imported or exported. The summary of the Food Standards Agency (FSA) Report 2021 contains:
The Nation’s Plate
Data shows that over the past ten years, the nation’s nutrient intake stayed consistent, but although the sugar intake decreased overall, consumers eat more than the recommended dosage with about 28% of England adults living with obesity as of 2019. The average weight of adult-age Brits increased with the lack of physical activity and the change in the way adults ate throughout the pandemic – showing an overindulgence in sugar-filled and fatty foods and not enough portions of fibers, fruits, vegetables and fish. But who is responsible for this?
Average consumption of free sugars as a proportion of daily total energy (2020)
Source: Public Health England NDNS: Diet and physical activity – a follow-up study during COVID-19
Average daily saturated fat consumption as a proportion of daily total energy (2020)
Source: Public Health England NDNS: Diet and physical activity – a follow-up study during COVID-19
According to research from the FSA and FSS’s (The UK Public’s Interests, Needs and Concerns Around Food research), 22% of people in the UK order from takeout and 23% order delivery services at least once a week – mostly coming from young adults or those from higher income households.
The factors found to influence our food choices in recent years according to this data include:
- The price of food: Healthy foods are “priced out” for most people and difficult to keep both wallet and body healthy
- Health concerns: After education over the years, 49% of people interviewed alerted to avoid food with trans fats, palm oil, preservatives, or E numbers
- Eating trends: More people are turning to a “flexitarian” diet to reduce their meat intake
- Ethical concerns: the treatment of animals in the food chain would be a factor of not eating meats; the plastic waste would be another key factor in environmental concern
Impacts from the pandemic on food consumption choices:
- Having healthy eating is tougher to the consumers due to their financial situations
- The pandemic allows more people to cook at home and have healthier options
- Consumers tended to eat more snacks during the lockdown
- More online grocery shopping
Public priorities for the future (research from The FSA and FSS’s The UK Public’s Interests, Needs and Concerns Around Food research) include:
Priority 1: Ensure equitable access to healthy, safe, and affordable foods
- More people intend to purchase healthier foods with an affordable price
Priority 2: Maintain & strengthen food safety and hygiene standards:
- 43% of consumers enforce clearer labelling of food ingredients and allergens is the key priority
Priority 3: Act on additives and processed foods
- People are aware that unhealthy foods contain trans fats, palm oil, preservatives, or E numbers
(Download the full report from the FSA for more priorities, or request demo here for enhancing your business)
Going global:
% of total UK imports sourced from the EU and from other regions, 2017-21
- Around 40 million tons of food are imported from abroad every year; the EU remains by far the biggest supplier, accounting for over 90% of all beef, dairy, eggs, and pork products imported into the UK and nearly two-thirds (65%) of all food and feed not of animal origin
- Despite recent volatility in import patterns, there are no signs of any immediate or wholesale shift in trading flows following the UK’s departure from the EU, though EU imports of fish, lamb and mutton, and pork have all fallen between 2019 and 2021.
- Although there is no evidence that the standards of EU imports have fallen, the FSA and FSS believe the current situation does reduce our ability to prevent foods that do not meet the UK’s high standards from being placed on our market. The lack of import controls means we are not receiving official assurance from the exporting country that imports meet the UK’s high food and feed safety standards; the absence of border checks could also affect how we identify and respond to safety risks in future, with additional resource required by the UK to maintain levels of food safety assurance for these imports
The impact of EU departure on import controls:
- The protocols on Ireland/Northern Ireland took effect on 1 January 2021 and requires Northern Ireland to apply EU import requirements on any products entering the EU regulatory zone from outside the EU
- Not receiving official assurance from the exporting countries that those imports meet the UK’s high food and feed safety standards
To keep rapid alerts available from the latest news from the world, Safefood 360° RISK provides alert system to monitor. Safefood 360° RISK combines both RASFF and World Bank data for the most up to date news and risk alerts and monitor safety alerts worldwide.
Safe and Sound:
- There are 2,363 reported food incidents in the UK in 2021, down from 2019 (2,598) but remains similar number to 2020 (2,261).
- Contamination by harmful micro-organisms was the most frequently reported hazard: 584 cases (browse our technical datasheet to understand how to prevent the harm from the hazards)
- There have been increasing numbers in incidents involving poultry meat in the UK from 2019 – 2021 (83 to 238 cases); especially seen in Salmonella in breaded chicken (download our datasheet about the Salmonella to know the prevention of it)
- Dietetic food incidents have nearly doubled since the previous year (128 cases to 207)
Total number of product recall information notices issued in the UK
Source: FSA/FSS Incident Management Systems
There are 59 cases of recall in the UK in 2021.
Once the food incident has been identified, the food product may have to be withdrawn or recalled, not only costing food businesses money and reputation, but also directly affects the public’s health.
Most of the incidents can be avoided by the good management procedure (HACCP) and by managing the food process with Safety plan management solution. Request a demo to learn more about how Safefood 360° helps you to reduce the chances of food related incidents.
Informing Consumers
The UK’s departure from the EU prompted a series of actions designed to minimise disruption, including new legislation, changes to compositional standards and origin labelling. A new UK Nutrition and Health Claims Committee (UKNHCC) has also been established to provide expert advice and scrutiny on food marketing claims. Existing arrangements remain in Northern Ireland under the terms of the Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland.
The food labelling must contain the information below:
- Name and description
- Ingredients list
- Nutritional information
- Best before or use by date
- Warnings if the food contains additives such as caffeine
- Places of Origin
Food Labels
Source: Our Food 2021, FSA report
From a consumer’s point of view, this has had very little noticeable impact to date – the immediate focus has been on maintaining continuity with existing EU laws to minimise any disruption to the supply chain. However, for food business owners, some important foundations for a post-EU approach to food information standards have been put in place:
- Food law changes into British law
- Removing mutual recognition of food composition standards from 1 Oct 2022
- Changes to address and country of origin labelling
What if you have over 500 products in your food business? Our Food Safety Management Solution is designed to improve your business processes within the food industry, allowing you to easily pass audits and maintain compliance with GFSI recognised food safety standards. Browse our Food Safety Management Solution to learn how it helps your business and your supplier chain.
If you are ready to learn more now, request a demo with one of our food safety experts.
Keeping It Clean
The current level of legal compliance with hygiene standards across food and feed businesses in the UK:
Keeping to monitor the latest legilastion is not easy. Safefood 360° provides an integrated platform for your food safety management and supplier quality management. The software is built by a group of food experts to customise what you really need to secure the assurance and make your aduit become easy. If you have any questions about your current FSMS, SQMS or RISK Assessment systems, submit a demo request for a professional consultation to get your business into next level.
Alcoa+ Principles: What can the food industry learn from life sciences
in blog, Food Safety KnowledgeNo matter where you are based, the global food manufacturing industry must comply with strict regulatory requirements, retailer demands and legal frameworks.
While the nuances of each of these asks may vary, compliance to their principles and quality standards to mitigate risk are at the heart of every action in food safety.
In this regulated landscape, maintaining data integrity is paramount, not just from a business perspective, but more importantly, ethically, it is needed to ensure that manufactured products do not cause any threat to life.
From the creation of HACCP in the 1960’s up to the modern day, the industry has grappled with evolving demands and how best to demonstrate compliance with them.
It is evident that having a standard and complying with a standard are two different demands, and the fallacy of audits to these requirements are that they present a moment frozen in time, rather than a holistic view of the real-world application of any management system.
Where records are created, they are often paper-based and islands unto themselves, presenting a microcosm of what happened on that specific day, at that specific time, and too often, do not help us determine greater learnings.
GFSI compliant schemes like BRCGS, SQF (Safe Quality Food), FSSC and IFS allow us to standardize the questions we ask of our data and uncover learnings, however, as these are ultimately industry-led, is the question worth asking, do these ask enough, or rather to be more specific, do their outputs of complying with them enable us to ask the right questions?
To answer this, this blog proposes a thought-experiment of looking at what learnings we can derive from another highly regulated industry, specifically the pharmaceutical industry.
What is ALCOA+
ALCOA+ is a set of principles designed to ensure data integrity in the pharmaceutical industry but has also become commonplace in other related healthcare and bioscience related spaces.
Quite simply, data integrity is ensuring the “completeness, consistency and accuracy of data” (Source, Page 2 https://www.fda.gov/files/drugs/published/Data-Integrity-and-Compliance-With-Current-Good-Manufacturing-Practice-Guidance-for-Industry.pdf) and ALCOA+ is a means to achieving that.
Originally introduced by the US Food and Drug Administration with a condensed scope of ‘ALCOA’, it has since expanded to include the ‘+’ and its principles can be applied to manufacturing, clinical research, testing, validation, and supply chain compliance.
In addition to evolving, the use of ALCOA+ principles have also spread and impacts how these sectors approach GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) as well.
ALCOA is an acronym which means that a document should be something which is:
Further to this, the ‘+’ refers to documents that are also:
To ensure we have a fuller understanding of each point before we consider what learnings the food industry can take from this framework, we must briefly provide an explanation for each:
Attributable
While anonymous data can be used, such as in instances of whistleblowing, to apply learnings, we must understand the context in which the data was generated.
When we say that something is attributable, therefore, we are meaning that the origin of the data itself, be it manually created by a person or automatically generated by a sensor or machine reading, is identified as well as the time and date that the measurement was taken.
While the idea of this is nothing that will be new to any reader, there are vulnerabilities that we may not consider if the necessary security provisions are not applied.
Systems that allow anonymous access, or password sharing between members of a team can expose a business to falling at the first hurdle here and disqualifying the data from being attributable.
Legible
If your company is still using manual systems, it likely is still doing so with printed forms and checklists.
While this will structure the data, it is still potentially illegible depending on the cursive skills of the person who completed the record, or indeed, the type of paper being used.
Today, in many factories around the world, paper-based records are still commonplace and in use, so it is wise to take precaution and consider the type of materials we use.
Simple things like pen thickness can impact legibility, and if your factory deploys carbon paper to improve record keeping, the thickness of sheets should be considered as simple things like the digits ‘8’ and ‘3’ can easily be confused with the degradation of each copy.
Naturally, digital systems negate many of these potential pitfalls from the off and ensure that data can be read, however, even these systems must consider their place against other ALCOA considerations.
Contemporaneous
It is critical that the records you are keeping are reflective of the moment that they are pertaining to capture.
This means data should strive to be caught when it was generated or as close to the observation as possible, so that they reflect an accurate and complete picture of circumstance.
If a record is retroactively ascribed, it is possible that details may be forgotten or neglected to be included.
While one detail may be trivial and matter in the total picture of things, if left unchecked, these can quickly compound and create an issue.
This then means that future comparisons of current data against past data may be at odds and not able to be reconciled.
Further compounding this can be a potential risk of unchecked or unknown bias, where data being sampled retroactively may skew results if the individual happens to pick samples that are less onerous to test.
Again, software systems help mitigate against this risk with complete record keeping captured at source and random sampling to prevent against bias.
Original
‘Original’ data can also be considered ‘raw’ or ‘source’ data and refers to the data in its purest form at the point of capture.
This data represents a true picture and should be preserved in its original form before any assessment or application is made to the data.
For instance, temperature or sample readings in a monitoring record refer to the original data, and readings that refer to Mass Balance or Weight Averages would be considered additional or meta data.
In a paper-based process, this data can easily be skewed, misinterpreted, or truncated as it is copied from one form or format to another.
A digital system which can capture a higher quantity of digits and thus, more of the “original data” so it avoids things like rounding, resulting in a more complete picture that more accurately represents the true circumstances of output.
Accurate
There is a quote often attributed to Grace Hopper that “one accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions.”
Accuracy is implied across all facets of quality management and underpins every reading we capture.
Over the years as the sophistication of machines, sensors, and indeed our ability to record information has grown – our ability to be more accurate has become pronounced.
The benefits of electronic systems compared to paper in this regard are unparalleled.
Fueled by the acceleration of systems like Hadoop, Data Lakes, Warehouses and indeed, Data Lakehouses, we are now able to capture a large quantum of data and recall it faster than ever.
This means that we can be more precise with machine calibration, maintenance, and proactively predict wear and tear.
The result is that Accurate systems striving for Total Data Quality deliver fundamental value to the bottom line of the business across Statistical Process Controls, Thorough Put, Yield, Waste, Rework, Scrap and knowing our Takt Time.
While the above considerations provide a solid baseline for data principles, they are further complimented and enhanced by the ‘+’ which includes four more areas which can be applied to create a more robust data strategy.
Complete
There is a theory that it is not just the data for product spec that we wish to capture that we should – but rather all original data and metadata should be collected as well.
This means that the ‘golden thread’ of data covers as absolute a picture as possible and can be reconciled against one another.
This includes retests, environmental data, batching details from lot number to time of goods-forward, audit logs, sensor readings, etc.
Consistent
Record keeping must be equal in its application.
Where possible, readings should occur to a defined and rigorous schedule, recorded in the moment and any deviations from the process monitored so that its effect on the captured data can be considered.
This is a principle that is quite tricky for humans and manual systems to adhere too, as variation is all but inevitable as front-line employees work at different speeds or have ad hoc tasks to perform in any given day.
As such, outsourcing, and capturing this at source in an electronic record, can give additional peace of mind.
Enduring
Retention of records and their availability to be accessed upon demand is ital.
A strong history of data capture that is archived and inaccessible is of no use as it cannot stand the test of time.
Vendors who provide systems must also ensure that access is uninterruptable, and the right redundancies are in place.
This is why Safefood like many vendors, includes automated daily data backup, multiple records across dispersed geographical servers and best practice disaster/recall recovery support.
Available
Last, but certainly not least, data must be available to all – or at least those that are in position to use it to drive continuous improvement.
It is of little merit or value to execute the above principles only to have the data locked in an environment where it cannot be used to help enhance processes.
If the data is available to everyone, it may overwhelm, cause confusion, or indeed, potentially compromise intellectual property or competitive edge.
Putting appropriate safeguards in place that protect the extent to which this data can be accessed and retrieved can be easier with software systems rather than needing to have manual security in place to protect or monitor specific areas of your facility.
How to apply ALCOA+?
Depending on where your facility and personnel are starting from, the best way to apply the above principles is likely to divide them amongst the relevant stakeholders with separate projects for each.
A GAP assessment of current status can be a good starting point, as it will reveal gaps from your ‘as-is’ to its ‘should-be.’
Once the assessment and these potential pitfalls are known to you, you could couple this with a Failure Mode Effects Analysis to quantify the potential risk to the business, and indeed, what costs could be incurred.
The good news is operating and adhering to ALCOA+ with manual systems can be done, however, it does require ongoing maintenance, drive, oversight, and cross department co-operation.
As such, it can often be burdensome on resources and while projects typically start strong, they may decrease in effectiveness as employee churn occurs or manual creep in systems takes place.
The better news is that there are ready-made solutions in the market available today which can help, Safefood 360 is one such system.
Our software combines more than 35+ modules which are purpose built for global legislation and technical standards such as GFSI, BRCGS, SQF, FSSC, and ISO22000.
Each of these modules can replace your current systems and brings the different elements of ALCOA+ together so you can remain in step with best practices.
All of our projects are supported by a team of Food Safety Professionals who will take the pain out of a digital transformation and be more than a support to you.
These services include full set up and deployment of all records, programmes, data, and tasks, so your team can remain focused on value added activities and contributing to your company’s bottom line.
Still not sure? Click the button below and contact us to see how.
Introducing Audit Management 360: Better Food Safety Audits
in blog, Product UpdatesWe are delighted to announce Audit Management 360, an enhanced version of the existing Safefood 360 Audit Management Solution.
The solution is relevant to food manufacturers and distributors of all sizes and will help them to simplify their audit processes and securely report findings.
For the first time, the solution will enable native offline functionality, allowing users to complete audits anywhere, and upload the results later, using our new mobile app.
Fully compliant with all retailer and technical standards like BRCGS, SQF and FSSC 22000, the app delivers a new and enhanced User Experience which delivers a simpler interface and streamlined workflows for mobile devices.
Until now, the Safefood 360 platform has always been browser agnostic, however, this new development is designed to address some of the expanding needs that our customers have articulated and provides a simpler, more user-friendly experience.
What is Audit Management 360?
Audit Management is a new solution designed for stakeholders across the supply chain at all levels who are involved in the audit process.
At its core, the solution is designed to assist Quality, Compliance and Technical Managers that the full FSMS already caters for, but will provide them the option of priming management to transition to a full digital solution at a lower entry cost point and with minimal demand on resources.
Audit Management 360 brings together the existing Auditing, Corrective Action and Management Review programs and workflows, supported by Safefood 360’s backbone functionality of master data management, document management, the reporting centre, and alert management.
In addition, Audit Management 360 is the first Safefood 360 solution to have its workflows available on the new Safefood 360 mobile app which gives users the option to conduct internal audits online or offline using their devices.
We have developed the solution in response from our user base to evolving mark need to utilize hybrid working while maintaining compliance and oversight of facilities in accordance with GFSI and retailer technical standards.
The solution will allow users to maintain oversight with retailer and technical standards to the same extent as when all resources are available on site with significantly less labour resources needed to be physically present.
New workflows designed specifically for mobile audits, will make it easier than ever to use and remove barriers in adoption across the wider work force.
What’s included (Features)
How to get the solution?
Getting to grips with understanding where to start with Safefood 360° has never been easier.
Our team of professionals are standing by to discuss your requirements and see if this is the right fit for you.
If it is, they will arrange a live demonstration which takes place on a 1-to-1 basis for you and your stakeholders to look at the system.
During this session they will advise you of what the next steps in your digital transformation will look like, or, if we’re not a fit, were other parts of our LGC ASSURE network can assist you.
Don’t miss out and to speak to our team today, to find out more.
Unlocking the Power of SPC in Food Safety: A Webinar Recap
in Food Safety Industry News, blog, Product Updates