7. Crisis management

Crisis management above all entails crisis management in collaboration with the responsible authorities. Attempts by a company to cover up or ignore an issue are particularly problematic.

The author of this article has faced numerous crises up front, providing the practical experience to manage these. In the following, practical crisis examples are used to illustrate and elucidate what measures can be used in what ways to guarantee a future-proof presentation of prevention.

Some essential perspectives on crisis management:

Customer, authority, or consumer complaints cannot be left unanswered. They are a vital source of information about the safety of a company's products. In principle, it does not matter whether a customer complains that a product expired before the indicated expiry date, or that this is documented in an officially logged complaint. In all cases, the same concrete circumstance applies, namely, that the products expired before the expiry date. This might have various causes, some of which might not be attributable to the producer (for example, an interruption of the cooling chain at the retailer).

If the food business operator fails to follow up on this complaint and fails to process this complaint in an appropriate manner, the situation might develop into an actual crisis. This rings true particularly considering the fact that authorities, after repeat comparable violations, no longer assume negligence but rather accuse the food business operator of intent.

Within a crisis management context, all procedures and work instructions relating to the handling process of complaints should be defined. An example of this is the development of forms for consumer complaints to help employees summarise complaints by phone or in writing, with an accompanying work instruction. Here, the development of a crisis plan is of the utmost importance, and this is a type of work instruction that prescribes how to act in crisis situations. This not only applies to the company itself; authorities are also obligated to develop crisis plans. This is fundamentally regulated by the Basic Regulation of the European Commission, which drafts a general crisis management strategy together with the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the member states. This strategy is used if the preventive, curative, and reductive risk measures defined in the Basic Regulation do not suffice.

Another method to improve food safety lies in informing consumers, by increasing their knowledge of food and certain potential hazards related to food. Poultry offers another example. If it is cleaned in water that is subsequently used to wash lettuce leaves, this might lead to salmonellae finding their way into the food. This is why good kitchen hygiene practices are of cardinal importance. Gaps in consumer knowledge can be filled by relevant product information or by informational campaigns. This information should be written in simple language.

This goes to show that 'risk minimisation' is a very diverse topic, some practical examples are explored in the following.
