Instability comes from long supply chains, the nature of supply and demand and increasing production volumes in certain areas.
Food notifications increased by 9% and there were spikes in different industries – for example meat (non-poultry) increased by 71%.
Supply and demand changes
The flux in supply and demand is at the centre of unpredictable peaks and troughs in food safety notifications.
This puts a strain on manufacturers or forces supply chains to extend into new territories and sources, resulting in a drop in safety.
Long supply chains lead to variations in standards because as one issue is resolved, another one arises.
The length of the supply chain for some food goods has a significant impact on the safety of the products being transported, said the index report.
Farzad Henareh, European managing director at Stericycle ExpertSOLUTIONS, said there are two main reasons for the rise in recalls.
“One is the globalisation of the supply chain and increasing length means issues come as a result of scale,” he told FoodQualityNews.com.
“The second point relates to heavy demand to produce or manage surplus product. To prevent a drop in quality manufacturers must have a team to deal with additional requests and sudden fluctuations as you need auditing and quality control in place.”
In the second quarter the top five accounted for 36% of all recalls/notifications and four of the five were non-European countries.
China, India and USA were at 8% while Vietnam and Turkey were at 6%.
Netherlands saw a significant increase in notifications (+18) from Salmonella in poultry meat and poultry products and Italy (+13) from fish and fish products or other seafood.
Brazil is one of the top three poultry exporters in the world (behind China and the US) and ships to over 150 countries.
The length of this supply chain, coupled with competition within Europe, puts it as the most significant offender when it comes to the country of origin for recalls and safety notifications.
Henareh said traceability may be a significant investment but it is one of the hurdles to get over to nip problems in the bud – especially when 58% of products reach the consumer before recall.
“It is a tremendous challenge for manufacturers to gain control of their quality monitoring process but there are ways to decrease the number of products which reach the consumer,” he said.
“Nowadays there are monitoring tools in place, especially on social media, if you see people talking about a product you can start the risk assessment process and prevent distribution to further countries if there is a problem.”
Notification categories
Fruit and vegetables are the biggest with 23% because of the nature of perishables of this kind dictates that products are consistently at risk.
Any mistake in pesticide or fertilizer use leads to an automatic recall or notification.
Meat and meat products (other than poultry) were a new entry in the food recall and notification categories with 7% as it had the most significant increase.
Dietetic products are most commonly in the hands of customers at the point of recall due to their lengthy shelf lives. Dietetic foods, food supplements and fortified foods came in at number three with 10% on the notification categories.
The increased demand for fish – up 2.5% from last year – was accompanied by a rise in safety notifications.
There were 12 more notifications in Q2 compared to Q1, highlighting the challenges caused by increased volumes.
The notifications in Q2 2014 resulted most often in withdrawal from the market, destruction or redispatch to their original location.
Fruits and vegetables were most commonly destroyed, in 37% of cases, nonperishables, plus fish and bivalve molluscs, were withdrawn from the market.
Meat and poultry meat were sent back to where they came from.