 When the sliced onions served up on McDonald’s Quarter Pounders were part of an E. coli outbreak that killed one person and sickened 75 others in October, the incident highlighted the importance of partnerships across the supply chain. Problems can always happen, but when you have partners you can trust to be transparent, proactive and collaborative, you help ensure that those problems are quickly identified and prevented from growing. How well does this describe your network – and your interactions with it?
You may gain some peace of mind if you give your supply chain an informal audit to ensure it operates in a way that contains risks. A recent report from Modern Restaurant Management recommended some areas to assess: Break up silos. Moving to an interconnected model ensures consistent processes, data, and practices, which can help you avoid delays and inaccuracies. Make sure you’re built for speed. Recalls demand a rapid response, from the source to the end consumer. Each of your supply chain partners should be able to verify their inventory, remove contaminated items, and contribute to shared reporting in a timely way. Use standard processes. Uniform systems can simplify product tracking and removal if needed. Test your readiness. Run recall simulations with trading partners to clarify roles and identify knowledge gaps. Take clear action. Once a contaminated product is identified, be in a position to share targeted, actionable messages with stakeholders, including instructions and next steps. Finally, use technology to improve performance. It should enhance your traceability, help you automate processes, and enable you to communicate across your supply chain when you need to.  In your restaurant, to what extent do your staff simply expect to find intermittent food safety issues with the ingredients you bring into your business? A recent Food Safety Magazine article describes how in food processing facilities, there seems to be a focus on controlling as opposed to preventing certain food safety hazards. In other words, comments like “We expect to find Listeria in our plant” have become common. But this response is more about fighting fires than preventing them from happening – and this creates risks that trickle down to foodservice operations. When a food safety issue is tolerated and corrected on the spot without further action, tolerance becomes encouraged. From there, the problem is likely to become more common – for both the food processor and the restaurants downstream that serve its products. So within your foodservice business, how do you stop this downward drift in food safety standards? When someone on your team finds a problem, are they clear about what to do next? Do you have procedures in place to make sure the supplier is notified and can explain what sustainable steps they will take to prevent the issue from recurring? Finding weak points in your food safety procedures (internally and up the supply chain) and then taking prompt action can help ensure you’re not in permanent firefighting mode when it comes to your food safety.
 Times of high inflation and consumer demand place added pressure on suppliers to deliver to their customers. Even if you pride yourself on your restaurant’s safety practices and record, your business is only as safe as its supply chain. Protecting it, and, by extension, your own ability to ensure quality for your guests, comes down to transparency. How well do you trust each link in your supply chain? Where can you develop a better relationship with certain suppliers? You can digitally manage your supplier certifications and flag any potential gaps for further investigation – or to simply prompt a conversation that can help you build trust with suppliers.
 Supply chain strains and the war in Ukraine have challenged food security around the globe and, in the process, increased the likelihood for food fraud. Seafood, which is regularly traded, is especially susceptible to it, but grains, meat and legumes have also been impacted by food fraud in recent years. Chris Elliott, food safety expert and founder of the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, told New Food magazine recently that one of the biggest consumer risks from food fraud is the fraudulent introduction of allergens into food products, which threaten the health of a restaurant’s customers. That risk is followed by the emergence of new proteins that may come from unsustainable sources. Restaurants can best protect themselves from the rising risk of food fraud by sourcing items locally, which simplifies and clarifies the supply chain; closely monitoring the path an ingredient must take to reach their business; assessing any vulnerabilities that may exist with staff, technology, inventory procedures and suppliers; and being transparent with both staff and customers about sourcing – it will naturally help increase an operation’s awareness of fraud when it occurs.
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