World Food Safety Day: Some heroes wear capes, others are just made of paper

Food safety plays a critical role in assuring that food stays safe at every stage of the food chain. From production to harvest, processing, storage, distribution - all the way to preparation and consumption.

With an estimated 600 million cases of foodborne illnesses annually, unsafe food remains a threat to human health and economies. 

Today, we celebrate World Food Safety Day. Every 7^th of June, the aim is to draw attention and inspire action to help prevent, detect and manage foodborne risks, contributing to food security, human health, economic prosperity, agriculture, market access, tourism and sustainable development. This year, World Food Safety Day is drawing attention to food standards. 

Each year, foodborne diseases affect 1 in 10 people worldwide. Food standards help us to ensure what we eat is safe

At Vandemoortele, we want to be leaders in food safety.

We take all necessary measures to prevent contamination with foreign bodies, allergens, chemicals or microbiological elements. Our foreign body policy for the BP business line outlines a protocol to prevent foreign objects, such as pieces of plastic, metal or insects, from ending up in our food products. This policy has also been introduced in MCOF sites as well, with strong focus on knowledge sharing.

This document has been designed to improve the foreign body prevention and it consists of a gap analysis of the requirements that have to be met to assure food safety. Based on this policy, our quality managers perform a gap analysis and develop specific action plans for their departments.

The main topics of this policy are:

• Management commitment;

• Detection methods (metal and X-ray detection);

• Packaging;

• Ingredients;

• Loose equipment;

• Environment;

• Maintenance and intervention;

• Fixed equipment and infrastructure;

• Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP);

• Other procedures (see below).

Thanks to the adoption of this procedure, our target for the reduction of food safety complaints also improved, having reached -57% in 2022.

However this procedure is not the only way we use to ensure food safety. We do this in many different ways.

Discover more in our Annual Integrated Report 2022.