Dairy Checkoff: Food Safety Is Everyone's Business

When food safety issues make the news headlines, consumers take notice. Consumer confidence in an entire category can suffer, and that’s why the dairy checkoff makes food safety a big priority. Tim Stubbs, the senior vice president of food safety and research for Dairy Management, Incorporated, said food safety management has come a long way.

“We always say food safety is not competitive, and there are a couple of reasons for that," said Stubbs. "One is, at the end of the day, we're all in business to help people. Yeah, you make a paycheck, you build a company, but if you don't have customers, you don't have customers, right? So, our number one goal is to protect our customers. To do that, most people have learned to share generously and to have good conversations with each other. A black eye for one is a black eye for all. Most of the time, it is small, but every once in a while, we have a really big incident like this current lettuce incident, that has a significant impact on the volumes in an entire category.”

Several Successes To Share

Food safety incidents in other categories emphasize the need for increased food safety vigilance in the dairy industry.

“We've seen that in hot dogs with recalls, with 40% category declines," said Stubbs. "We've seen that in cantaloupe, where the volumes have gone down for years on end after a major outbreak, and lettuce was probably just finally climbing out of the penalty box from all the E. coli outbreaks a few years ago. We don't want it to damage our reputation as a whole, and it drags down the whole industry.”

Various industry groups across the dairy sector work closely together to make food safety a top priority.

“So, we will help teach those who don't know as well as we do what the basics are, which is a super useful thing," Stubbs noted. "It's important. It's still a core activity for us. We regularly run a best practice sharing activity. Sometimes they run for two years. Sometimes they are one phone call. Our collaboration with IDFA and NMPF has gone way up, and I'll give you an example: We've said, okay, based on these pressures, what are the best practices? The checkoff portion will focus on best practices in a dairy powder facility to control Cronobacter, as an example. IDFA will have conversations with FDA about what their expectations are in that space, and at the end of the day, this drives a lot of dairy volume because that conversation is very focused on powdered infant formula, which is a very large and very profitable portion of dairy's portfolio. So, we've gotten closer to that line of what we're doing is to help the industry as a whole and protect the industry's reputation.”

Customer Safety A Priority

Volunteers from across the dairy industry give food safety guidance that everyone can use, regardless of how big or small their operations.

“We now have about 150 volunteers, and it includes lots of small regional companies," said Stubbs. "Usually, it’s the owner, and that's really great when we're helping the small people because we can put things into the phrasing that actually works for them, and tells them, ‘Here's actually what I need. You know, don't tell me how to clean my floors. I know how to do that. I want to know how to manage my environmental monitoring program without jumping all the way to this humongous, complicated, expensive thing that the big companies do. Is there a little middle ground that will satisfy my needs, protect my customers, make my regulators happy, but not cost me a million dollars a year?’ Okay, let's write guidance in that space. And by the way, instead of using pathogen testing, we're just going to use cleanliness testing, which is cheap and rapid. You can have little swipes that you do in your plant, and then every once in a while, you're going to supplement with the big tool just to verify that everything you're doing is working.”

Stubbs added the dairy industry’s "number one priority" will always be to protect the consumers who buy their products.