Practice, Practice, Practice. Why Mock Recalls Are So Important
Being recall ready goes beyond checking off the boxes for meeting traceability requirements, qualification standards, or meeting auditing requirements for certifications. “It’s really a discussion that needs to happen from a business continuity standpoint within an organization so that should there be an issue, the team has actually talked through different strategies and ways of technically executing a recall within the organization,” says Ryan Gooley, recall consultant at Stericycle ExpertSolutions. During an interactive workshop at next week’s Food Safety Consortium conference, Gooley will lead attendees through recall scenarios and help them create a recall plan to address global needs, communications strategies, resource allocation, and business continuity requirements. Gooley recently sat down with Food Safety Tech to discuss the importance of mock recalls within the food industry.
Food Safety Tech: What are the most common mistakes food companies make in preparing (or not preparing) for a recall?
Ryan Gooley: One of the mistakes companies make is not having the discussion internally about a recall and whether they are ready and able to respond to and support a recall. Although it’s becoming less of an issue, people still don’t want to talk about recalls—they’re afraid if they talk about it, it will happen to them.
They also take their industry partners, whether supply chain partners or existing vendors, for granted.
Ryan Gooley is leading a session, The Multiplier Effect: How One Ingredient Can Lead to Multiple Recalls, at the 2016 Food Safety Consortium conference on Thursday, December 8 | Learn More In addition, companies miss the amount of effort and resources it takes to properly support a recall once a communication goes out. This specifically relates to class I or class II recalls that go down to the consumer level and involve press releases and media exposure.
In any industry, your resources are geared toward producing product and getting it into the market; it’s not the reverse of managing take-backs and returns, and communicating to customers. A lot of it comes down to resource allocation.
FST: What are the most important elements of a recall plan in the food industry?
Gooley: Traceability is huge. Most companies have a pretty good understanding of traceability as it relates to where they receive ingredients, where the ingredients go within their processes, and ultimately where they are distributed. Traceability is important, because you can’t initiate a recall if you cannot identify where the suspect product went.
The other part of the recall plan is testing the plan. Going through your recall plan and testing it pulls together the different departments that are responsible for supporting the recall exercise and effort within the company. Having conversations about who is responsible for what, the information [that should be] pulled, and who needs that information is really important for building the team. [It ensures that] should a company need to initiate a recall, the team members who are engaged and responsible have actually talked through the process and practiced. With more practice comes more efficiency and less chance for error or oversights.
Another important element of a recall plan is understanding your communication plan and communication crisis management plan. A lot of people talk about recalls as just identifying the product and notifying downstream what to stop selling, etc., but a lot of what goes into the recall plan is business strategy—how are you going to manage not only retailer and customer calls, but consumer calls and media calls? Who is responsible for communicating what, when and where? Do you notify just your impacted customer or do you notify your non-impacted customers? What type of communication and messaging do you have? When companies have not done a mock recall exercise, oftentimes they have not had these conversations, and they really struggle on the communications piece, especially because it needs to be drafted, approved, and communicated in a very short period of time.