Martin Rohleder, Kadri Ilham, and Werner Linders, from Sealed Air and Diversey, were speaking exclusively to FoodQualityNews.com at the Global Food Safety Conference (GFSC) in Barcelona.
Rohleder, Ilham and Linders described how the units they represent, help to tackle food safety as part of a company-wide holistic approach.
Four key pillars
Martin Rohleder, executive director, sales and marketing, foodservice and fluids Europe, said one target was to minimise food waste and improve food safety but it is also about delivering more nutritional value out of the products.
“That’s what we do around food packaging, it covers four key pillars, driven by bringing value and protection, so it’s about the food safety element, it’s about extending shelf life which goes towards reducing waste.
“It’s about bringing operation efficiencies through innovative packaging that brings solutions both at food service operator level but also at retail outlet level, more in terms of their consumers but also back of house operations within the retailer.
“The fourth key pillar around that is also about the brand owning, looking at it from the broader sustainability point of view, how do we work with our customers to improve their brand image to the market.”
Communicate to reach sustainability
Ilham Kadri, president of the Institutional and Laundry Division, said communication was vital throughout the chain to achieve sustainability of a products lifecycle.
"Now sustainability is the best word, there is no one common language or one definition of sustainability and the beauty of the GFSI and what Sealed Air Corporation is doing with these initiatives, we are trying to build a common language between the different players in the value chain.”
She added that sustainability issues and food safety was in the heart of the agenda.
“People want to know more about how do we transport food, how we produce food, how we package it, how we clean in our environments were food is being processed…so we all have our part to play.”
Continuous improvement
Werner Linders, director of Diversey Consulting, Europe, Middle East and Africa, said: “We try to come in and not just do the consulting work and go out but stay and work together to achieve continuous improvement.”
He added it was critical that someone came to verify the design of the system and sees that it is implemented well.
“We start to see that quite some issues do originate from earlier in the supply chain so the interesting flow that we now start to see is that to help retailers it’s important that we go backwards into the supply chain and address issues in food manufacturing as well.”
Globalisation challenge
He described globalisation as a growing challenge as more and more consumers want a variety of foods available within their retailer.
“What often in the past was delivered by manufacturers’ within 50-100 kilometres away, now can come very fast in a matter of 24 hours from any place in the world.”
He added it was a big challenge with global food standards such as BRC and IFS across the world and how best to communicate the message of food getting safer and safer to the consumer and measure the growth in food safety, were other areas that need focus.