Food safety and crisis management

As a profession, agricultural economists have been leaders in studying food safety policy. Here is the new book, Toward Safer Food, by Sandra Hoffman and Michael Taylor. It starts the heavy lifting in building a scientific framework for studying food safety risks, along the lines called for by the National Academy of Sciences in an earlier report.

And Neal Hooker, Ratapol Teratanavat, and Victoria Salin have an interesting article out in the current issue of Food Policy (sorry, the full text requires a subscription or university library membership). They discuss what makes the management of a food safety crisis effective or ineffective:

Policy makers within the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) complement the role of meat and poultry plant managers in food recalls. The increasing frequency and scale of recalls raise questions whether sufficient attention is placed on these events. Three measures of recall effectiveness are introduced to evaluate this public-private crisis management process. Managerial and technical variables are compared to these measures of effectiveness. Results from regression models suggest that recalls carried out by the smallest sized plants, those that took place after Pathogen Reduction/Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point implementation, and recalls involving processed products are more effective. Little evidence of differences was found in the effectiveness of the crisis management process between meat plants compared with poultry plants or for plants that are part of a larger firm.

A scholarly study of food safety crisis management may be just what a business executive needs on a week when something REALLY gross happens. On that story, see also Effect Measure.