Tools At Our Disposal

By Jim Prevor, Editor-in-Chief, Produce Business

Zeus gave Sisyphus a task that could never be completed. The outbreaks have been so relentless that our task sometimes feels Sisyphean, but it is not. Rebuilding consumer and regulatory confidence in fresh produce is a doable task if we use the tools at our disposal.

Our biggest tool is the point in which we interact with consumers. Consumer research tells the industry many things about what consumers think, but it is a common mistake to believe the industry somehow operates separately from consumer perception.

If consumers look at the produce displays in their stores and see a fraction of the spinach items they remember once seeing, they are likely to doubt that all is “back to normal” and thus harbor doubts about the safety of certain items.

We need to be very careful about deducing from declining sales figures for certain items or categories. Small retail decisions, such as what to put on an ad, can easily account for dramatic swings at the cash registers.

Despite reports of lagging sales of spinach and other bagged salads, it is interesting that not one publicly held supermarket has mentioned a decline in overall produce sales as impacting earnings for 2006. This leads to the reasonable implication that other produce items have picked up the slack. Perhaps supermarkets and other produce retailers are just promoting other items.

Which points us to something that we forget at our peril: Supermarkets in general and retail produce executives, in particular, are in a completely different position than the producers of a particular commodity or category.

To a spinach company, the decline in spinach sales can be a catastrophe. To a bagged salad company, the decline in the category may be a major hardship, but to a supermarket, it is just a problem if consumers start eating less overall. If consumers buy more arugula and less spinach, it doesn’t really present a problem. If consumers buy more prepared salads in the deli and less bagged salad in produce, it will trouble the produce executives but not really the top executives at the retail chain.

Although a few retailers, very loyal to their suppliers, have tried to carry a full line of spinach products and promote as extensively as before, most retailers play a chicken-and-egg game with a reintroduction, trying to moderate the number of facings, SKUs, and ads in line with demand – but, of course, demand is very sensitive to these things.

PMA’s substantial investment in launching the Center for Produce Safety is laudable as it sends a clear message to regulators and consumers that the industry is dedicated to wiping produce-carried foodborne illness from the face of the earth. But to build regulatory and consumer confidence, it is not necessary to eliminate all foodborne illness any more than the aviation industry has had to stop plane crashes to get people to fly. What is necessary is to be able to quickly isolate outbreaks to individual shippers, plants, fields, process and harvest dates, etc.

We need excellent traceback systems so that we can take a bag of product and instantly reassure regulators and consumers that we have isolated the problem. We need excellent traceforward capabilities so that we can quickly recall and isolate all product shipped from implicated sources.

Obviously we hope to eliminate all foodborne outbreaks on fresh produce items, but it is this traceability that will provide the short term reassurance needed that any problems identified are isolated and so consumers can feel confident to consume and regulators can feel confident to recommend the consumption of any produce still out on the shelves after an outbreak is identified.

Many studies have shown that farmers are trusted by the consuming public. But we should probably take with a grain of salt consumer explanations of the specific things that the industry should do to create produce safety. Whether we need more testing or larger buffer zones is not something consumers can be expected to tell us.

Now with the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement in place and many other commodities developing their own guidelines, PMA wisely recognizes the need to move the industry to implementation, through training, and to marketing, through communications.

In this column focused on research, we should probably add a research caveat. Many efforts can benefit from the addition of a research component to check the efficacy of different messages and spokespeople. Even expenditures on training often become more valuable if a research component confirms that trained workers produce something better or more safely than those that haven’t gone through the training.

And finally, in the midst of this publication filled with words, a word should be said in favor of silence. More and more companies are adding food safety titles to their rosters and are mentioning their food safety programs in consumer media interviews. During the crisis, this was all understandable, but now every repetition of the words before consumers is likely to raise more unease than it settles.

Quality, safety, flavor — these are the kind of things that come about by doing the right things and following good agricultural practices and good manufacturing practices. They should be an integral part of what all of us do every day. Emphasizing the positive, doing the right thing, limiting the scope of any problem and continuing to work for long-term benefits — These are the solutions to our food safety problems, and there is nothing Sisyphean about doing any of this.