This blog was recorded live post today’s – April 4 2012 – National Sustainable Food Summit in Sydney. I am LRQA’s Cor Groenveld – Global Product Manager for Food Services - and here, I give my views on some of the key issues coming out from the conference following my presentation at Australia’s key event in the food supply chain calendar.
This was the second national Sustainable Food Event in Sydney. I think what I learned here is how important sustainability is in the food supply chain. There are some facts and figures; we waste one third of all the food that is made in the food supply, it is unbelievable that we have so much waste, but also if you look at food security, we still have a lot of people not even having food, coupled with the energy that we are wasting.
But for me the most important thing is how we proceed, because there is a lot of talk about sustainability in the food supply chain and there are great examples of projects but I think that we are not approaching it with a management systems approach.
What I talked about today in the panel discussion that I was part of, is perhaps we can learn from how we – LRQA – implements food safety across the food supply chain. Perhaps we can pick out energy management, waste management, water management and we can put these into a management system standard and I opened discussions on that. I think that this is something that we can look at in more detail in the future and also talk to stakeholders in the food supply chain to see if this is an approach that they would appreciate.
One Response to Can Food Safety Management Systems Help to Drive Sustainability?
Comment from Richard Smith on
Hi Cor, thanks for coming down to Australia!
I too would be interested in progressing this. The simple answer is we already have management system approach in ISO14001. But having a 14001 certification does not mean you are sustainable.
So, how can we learn from the food safety concept that you are either safe or not? Can you be sustainable or not? Or is sustainability too grey an area? It would certainly be nice if you could say this business / product / supply chain is sustainable and its been certified as so. Is this possible, or are their always trade-offs? Who would judge the criteria?
I think a forum like the GFSI could be a good place to explore these issues as retailers may like to lead rather than follow a plethora of standards and certifications. That said, there is also a marketing edge in sustainability that leads them to being less amenable to co-operation: the best for a retailer or producer is to be unique, or at least “the first”.
Perhaps that’s why you got better traction in the harmonisation of food safety through the GFSI – no one had marketers slapping labels on things to say they were safe.