UNIT 6, Lecture 2

Roles of Stakeholders in Food Safety

and Quality Assurance

 Key Stakeholders in Food Safety and Food

Quality Assurance

 There must be bodies in any country who

are assigned the responsibility of
enforcing compliance with food safety and
quality standards.
 There are also ways by which the various
enterprises in the supply chain can
internally ensure that they have complied
with all relevant standards

 Thus, compliance with food quality and food

safety standards can be assured through
both public and private control.

The main players engaged in assuring food

safety and quality include:
 All operators in the food chain; farmers,
processors, retailers, caterers, importers,
distributors and consumers

 support organisations such as technical and

scientific bodies, trade and consumer
groups

 Auditors and of certain certification and

accreditation schemes, and

 public control bodies, legislators and policy

makers; these are official agencies in the
food authority
 All these players should work together from
different angles to make sure that food
produced and offered for sale is safe for
consumption and also of good quality.

 Each has an important role to play. You can

see an example of the relationships among
key players in food quality and safety
assurance systems in Figure 6.1.
Figure 6.1: Key stakeholders in food quality and safety assurance –
an example
Food Safety Authority of Ireland – FSAI (
http://www.fsai.ie/publications/leaflets/corporate_leaflet.pdf )
 Role of the Public Sector – Official
Control Systems

 Certain control systems have been put in

place by the state to serve as checks in
assuring food safety and quality.

The objectives of official control systems

are:

 Protection of public health through

reduction of risks associated with food-
borne illnesses.
 Protection of consumers from unsanitary,
unwholesome,mislabelled, adulterated or
otherwise unsafe food

 Contribution to economic development by

providing a regulatory framework for
consumer confidence and facilitation of trade

 On the basis of the World Trade

Organization (WTO) SPS and Technical
Barriers to Trade (TBT) Agreements and
Codex Alimentarius, the functions of official
control are:
 food laws and regulations

 food control management

 inspection services

 laboratory services, and

 information, education, communication,

training.
 The principles underlying official control
systems are as follows:

 reduction of risks through prevention mechanisms

 farm-to-table approach

 science-based food control strategies

 management of emergency cases (e.g. recall of

products), and

 risk analysis (see description below).

 Organisation of Official Control

 Each country has different approaches on

which official bodies enforce the national
rules and standards on food.

 These differences reflect the size,

culture, history and modern policies of
governments.
 Poland, New Zealand and the Netherlands
are examples where inspection and control
is in the hands of a national
agency/authority with regional offices.

 In France a state Ministry has this

responsibility
 In Germany and Spain, the enforcement
role rests with large states within the
country.

 In Britain, devolution is extended to smaller

local councils where expenditure is targeted
on local priorities.
 Whatever the approach taken by
governments, major challenges to effective
enforcement and control on food include the
difficulty in ensuring a harmonised and
consistent approach and effort and the
ever-present need to curb public
expenditure.

 It can be unfair to certain businesses if

they are subject to zealous enforcement by
inspectors in one area of the country when
a company in a neighbouring district
receives no inspection visits or other
official compliance checks.
 Governments, whether local or federal,
always have competing priorities.

 This is one reason why the recent focus

has been on prevention of problems and
working with industry on food safety and
quality.
 Role of the Private Sector – Industry
Self-Control

 As you can deduce from the discussion

above, traditional control of final products
is no longer an adequate response to
growing public health and consumer
protection concerns.

 Furthermore, legal standards and

regulations do not guarantee food safety
and public health unless they are properly
observed and enforced.
 You can find many examples in the
marketing of sachet water, canned foods,
alcoholic beverages and medicinal drugs in
Ghana.
 Consumers are increasingly becoming aware
and concerned about food hazards and food
incidents.

 Entrepreneurs in the food supply chain who

do not comply with food safety and quality
standards will lose their customers and,
eventually, will be forced out of the
market.
 Hence, in today’s highly competitive food
markets, it is crucial for the various
actors on the food supply chain to:

identify and manage risks along the

chain

respond quickly to changing consumer

preferences, and

maintain their reputation for consistent

quality and safety
 exceed customer or consumer expectation

 In order to become competitive and retain

their stake in the local and international
markets, trade partners along the food
supply chain need to build trust and
confidence among themselves and with
their consumers in order to maintain and
even improve on the integrity of their
food supply and marketing systems.

 They can achieve this if they are able to

use best practices to meet or even
 Building on what we have seen in session 1, the
benefits of Industry Self-Control (industry
managed Quality Assurance System) are:

 incentive:
reduced business risks and costs can be
achieved through better management of food
quality/food safety at the source,

 meaning that costly withdrawal of

unhealthy/low quality products from the
market by control authorities can be avoided
by appropriate quality assurance along
production, processing, handling processes;
competitiveness:

 the capacity of suppliers to assure food

quality/food safety strengthens their
competitiveness in local/regional/international
markets through an improved
product/company/country image;

opportunities:

 improved production/handling practices (Good

Practices) may lead to reduced unit costs
reduced and/or increased productivity;
 promotion:
measures taken to protect consumer
health may be used as a marketing aid

 All industry schemes and private

standards, like mandatory government
rules, require checks to ensure they are
being followed correctly.

 Accreditation and certification schemes

have auditors; some large supermarkets
chains send representatives to supplying
farms and factories throughout the world.
 Best practice example of Industry Self-
Control

Oil seeds propagation, Ethiopia – Company-

managed Quality Assurance System:

 Input supply: company supplies

certified seeds to farmers

 Production: smallholder farmers

multiply seeds
 Quality assurance: assured by company
through embedded services to farmers

 Marketing/sales: company sells cleaned and

graded seeds

 Certificate holder: company holds certificate as

“certified seed supplier”

 Governance: contract regulates farmer-company

relations;
no risk of side-selling by farmers since seeds are
certified at company level
 Shift from traditional public control of
end-products to combined industry self-
control and risk-based official control

 Current trends in most parts of the world

require that foods produced for local
consumption and for export are safe for
consumption and of good quality.

 As you found in Unit 1, various factors

serve as drivers for these modern changes
in food production practices.
 Do you remember these drivers?

 As a result, agricultural entrepreneurs have

shifted their concept of food safety and
quality

 from product oriented-quality control,( i.e.

concentrating quality control on the final
product through inspecting, sampling,
analysing and certifying the end-product to
ascertain its quality)
 to process-oriented quality and safety
assurance concepts based on industry self-
control quality management systems

 In this approach, the industry ensures that

all the processes along the supply chain are
carried out in compliance with safety and
quality standards.

 (Industry self-control quality assurance

systems)
 The industry self-control quality assurance
system should be combined with risk-based
official (public) control of the industry self
control (Quality Assurance Systems).

 The official control system should monitor

what operators in the industry are doing in
order that they can direct their resources
to those areas of greatest risk.

 Official control bodies should now be able

to marshal their resources better so that
any malpractice by any of the actors on
the supply chain can be detected and dealt
with.
 Companies with a good reputation for their
well constructed and observed assurance
systems (especially if they are based on
HACCP) will require less enforcement
attention than often smaller businesses
which have few if any staff and almost
non-existent safety or quality assurance.

 Thus, the traditional official control of

final products in the market has changed to
a combined system comprising
 industry self-control (Quality Assurance
Systems) where the enterprises in the
supply chain institute measures that help
them to comply strictly with schemes and
standards to ensure food safety and
quality; and

 risk-based official control of the industry

Quality Assurance Systems which seeks to
monitor and the industry self control
systems (“control of the control”) with
targeted checks on end products (risk-
based control).
 These global developments imply that the
roles and responsibilities of public and
private stakeholders for assuring food
safety and quality have changed
considerably.

 Coordinating Official (Public) Control and

Industry Self Control

 An objective for coordinating official and

industry self-control is to make the agro-
industrial sector more competitive in
domestic and export markets.
 It is also important to target and not
duplicate costly and increasingly scarce
resources.

 A situation to avoid is where a farmer

receives a number of visits during one week or
even one day (!) from a variety of official and
private inspectors and auditors.

 Remember businesses can also be checked

for compliance with rules on the environment,
weights and measures, vehicles etc.
 Specifically, the coordination of food
controls is carried out through:

 simplifying and reducing state control of

final produce

 setting up process-oriented auditing

systems

 improving food safety measures

 talking to each other

 It is expected that end-product of
coordination of control systems:

 strengthens consumers’ confidence in food

safety and quality , and

 improves confidence and trust between

officialdom and industry.
 Guiding Principles

In order to attain this objective, the

following guiding principles must be followed:

 suppliers/ industry have to exercise primary

responsibility for food safety

 process-oriented self-control must be

complemented by official control, and

 pro-active attitudes, transparency and

openness must prevail on both sides.
 The better the industry self-control the
better the access to competitive markets is.

 Also, with better industry self-control, the

government can withdraw from its role as
chief inspector and target areas of greatest
risk to the consumer.