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Food Safety in the Supply Chain

Food safety is the number one priority for food manufacturers, and the good news for consumers is that, because of tight controls put in place by manufacturers, food and drink which is made and sold in the UK and Europe has never been safer.

Every product that you see on the supermarket shelf, be it ambient (which means you can keep it in your kitchen cupboard), chilled (which means you need to keep it in the fridge) or frozen, will have different, and sometimes very complex, food safety issues.

To help manage these issues and to ensure food safety manufacturers apply a system called HACCP (pronounced 'hass-up'), which stands for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points. Companies making food and drink use the HACCP system to look at their products and their manufacturing processes. They identify any potential dangers associated with the food or the process and then monitor these closely to ensure the product is safe. As well as the act of making a product, HACCP also covers the way ingredients and products are produced, stored in factories and transported around the country.

In the highly unlikely event that something does go wrong, there are procedures in place to allow manufacturers to contact the authorities and to let the general public know as soon as a problem is found. To help understand why something has gone wrong with a product, all food and drink manufacturers must be able to tell who supplied them with the ingredients used in a product and also who they supplied that product to. This is called 'one-up, one-down traceability'.