Outsourcing May Pose Challenges to Food Safety

In one respect, it’s not such a tangled web after all.

The recent recall associated with more than 90 brands of canned chili, stew and other products were traced back to a single manufacturer.

The same holds true for recent recalls of spinach, pet food and frozen meat.
And as one Cooperative Extension food safety expert observes, this fact speaks volumes about the way food is made and distributed in modern America.

Companies increasingly are outsourcing the foods we eat — paying others to make these foods or many of the ingredients in them. Some of these foods are sold under a variety of brand names. The issue has sparked another debate about how to ensure the safety of a food manufacturing and distribution system that partly because of this outsourcing is more complex than ever.

At Auburn University, Dr. Jean Weese, an Alabama Cooperative Extension System food safety specialist and professor of nutrition and food science, describes it as one of the ironies of the modern U.S. food supply. Americans enjoy a food system that is both cheap and efficient for consumers.

But turning out food as cheaply and efficiently as possible often involves cutting corners — the reason outsourcing makes financial sense for many companies that, for whatever reason, choose not to expand their own manufacturing facilities.

Weese agrees with other food safety experts that there is no inherent risk associated with this practice. Nevertheless, she says outsourcing does mean that the company whose label appears on the product hasn’t had immediate association with it.

“You’re turning over what you used to do at your own backyard to someone else,” Weese says. “In some cases, it means that an outsourced company is producing an entire line of food and slapping different labels on it — labels that represent big and small companies alike.

“Just because you walk away from a grocery store with products bearing major brand names doesn’t mean these companies actually made the products.”

Another factor associated with outsourcing that concerns Weese is that it renders the food distribution system even more complex by increasing the distance between the manufacturer and the consumer — a view shared by Jean Kinsey, co-director of the University of Minnesota’s Food Industry Center, who was quoted recently in an Associated Press article about outsourcing.

This complexity has added to the headaches of health authorities trying to assess the damage following food products recalls and outbreaks of food-borne illnesses.

For example, AP reports that last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration delayed issuing a consumer warning about botulism contamination in canned food until it could sort out the various brands under which the Castleberry Food Company’s product was sold.

Store-brand or private-label products account for much of the growth in the food outsourcing business, AP reports. Supermarkets, drug stores and mass merchandisers ring up more than $65 billion in store brand sales annually — one in every five items they sell, according to the Private Label Manufacturers Association, which was quoted by AP.

Posted by Jim Langcuster at September 5, 2007 11:10 AM