By Elfriede Giard Head of Food & Agriculture, AssureCloud, member of the CTI Group
Food security starts with food that is safe to eat
Every year on 16 October, the world stops to talk about hunger. It should. But there is a part of that conversation that seldom makes the headlines, and it is the part I have spent more than 30 years working in.
There is no food security without food safety. Contaminated food doesn’t just fail to nourish people, it makes them ill.
The World Health Organization estimates that up to 600 million people fall ill from contaminated food every year, and around 420,000 of them die. Africa carries a heavy share of that burden: more than 91 million illnesses and 137,000 deaths a year on our continent alone. Behind each of those numbers is a family, a missed school day, a lost wage, and very often a child.
Children carry the heaviest load. Children under five make up only 9% of the world’s population, yet they account for almost a third of all deaths from foodborne disease. And most of these illnesses don’t start with a dramatic failure. They start with everyday lapses: food kept at the wrong temperature, hands that weren’t washed, a product left on the shelf past its date. Small things, repeated thousands of times a day across a food system.
Innovate today. Nourish tomorrow.
This year’s World Food Day theme is “Innovate today. Nourish tomorrow.” When people hear the word innovation in food, they usually think of new crop varieties, vertical farms or plant-based burgers. Those matter. But on the ground, some of the most important innovation is far less glamorous. It is about knowing sooner, seeing more clearly and acting faster.
Speed matters because contamination doesn’t wait for a lab report. If a pathogen is sitting in a production environment, every day it goes undetected is another day of product leaving the building. If a dairy only finds out about a quality problem weeks later, that milk is long gone.
Visibility matters because you can only manage what you can see. A paper checklist in a filing cabinet tells you very little. Live data across hundreds of sites shows you where the risk is building, before it turns into an incident.
And people matter most of all. The best technology in the world won’t help if the person on the production line doesn’t understand why handwashing matters, or what an undeclared allergen can do to a child.
How we put this into practice at AssureCloud
I think of food safety as a chain. Testing, inspection, certification and training each hold one link. When they work together, the chain holds all the way from farm to fork.
Testing. Our six ISO/IEC 17025 accredited laboratories, anchored by the Midrand Super Lab and stretching from Cape Town to Lusaka, test food, feed, water and the environments where food is made. When the same organism turns up in more than one sample, MALDI-ToF source tracking helps establish whether it is the same strain, so our clients can find where contamination starts and remove it at source. In dairy, CombiFoss 7 measures up to 19 milk quality parameters in about six seconds, and BactoScan gives real-time bacterial counts. Our veterinary laboratories in Midrand and Lusaka help protect poultry flocks against avian influenza, Newcastle disease and Salmonella, because safe food starts with healthy animals.
Inspection. Our auditors complete around 3,500 food safety audits a month across retail, quick-service restaurants, hospitality and supplier sites in South Africa, the rest of Africa and the Middle East. Audits are done on a mobile device in real time, and reports are back within 24 hours. A store manager can fix a problem the same week, not next quarter.
Certification. Accredited by JASANZ and SANAS, we certify against FSSC 22000, ISO 22000, HACCP, GLOBALG.A.P. and other schemes in 31 countries. For smaller suppliers, the FSSC Development Program offers a realistic first step towards full certification. Aspirata, our certification body, is one of only 14 FSSC-licensed Development Program conformity assessment bodies in the world, and the only one headquartered in Africa. I am particularly proud of that. It means a local SMME can find its route onto retail shelves right here.
Training. Our 27-course catalogue runs from basic food handler hygiene and allergen management to FSSC 22000 lead auditor training. We deliver it face to face, on site or in a virtual classroom. We also use bite-sized learning: two- to three-minute videos that each tackle one specific problem, followed by a short assessment. It fits into a shift, and people remember it.
None of these on its own makes food safe. Together, they give a food business a clear picture of its risk, and the people and systems to manage it.
What our auditors found in stores this year
Because our audits are captured digitally in real time, we can see patterns across thousands of stores, not just one. And the same three problems keep coming up. None of them needs new technology to fix. They need good habits, done consistently, by people who understand why they matter.
1. Pest activity in receiving, storage and prep areas: 2,951 findings
On another 966 occasions, our auditors saw live cockroaches, rodents or droppings during the audit itself. Too often there is no sighting log, no sign-off from the pest control provider and no real control between visits.
What you can do this week:
- Keep a pest sighting log at receiving, storage and prep, and make sure every staff member knows to use it.
- Ask your provider to read and sign off the log at every service, and to act on what’s in it.
- Keep your yard clear of waste, pallets and standing water.
- Look at the trend. If sightings keep coming back in the same area, the cause is still there.
Your contractor services the traps, but your team runs the programme. Our half-day Pest Control in a Food Safety Context course teaches them how.
2. Ice cream temperatures: 2,545 findings
Soft ice cream is a warning sign that the cold chain has already been broken. The rule is simple: probe it, log it, act on it.
What you can do this week:
- Probe the product, not just the display thermometer, at set times every day.
- Record every reading, so you can see a freezer drifting before it fails.
- Agree what happens when a reading is out: who moves the stock, who calls the technician, and who decides whether product must be discarded.
- Don’t load freezers above the load line, and keep the doors and lids closed.
3. Expired products on the shop floor: 2,164 findings
This one worries me most, because it includes baby food. When expired stock reaches the shelf, stock rotation is failing at shelf level, not in the warehouse.
What you can do this week:
- Rotate on first expiry, first out, and pack new stock behind the old.
- Build a short daily date check into opening routines, starting with high-risk lines such as baby food, dairy and chilled products.
- Remove expired stock immediately and record it, so you can see which lines and which shelves keep causing problems.
All three come back to the same thing: people. That is why we link our audit findings directly to training. When the data shows a pattern, we can put targeted training in front of the teams who need it, on site, in a virtual classroom or as a short video they can watch during a shift.
Nourishing tomorrow starts with what we do today
When food safety work is done well, nobody sees it. Nobody posts about the outbreak that never happened or the recall that was never needed. That is exactly the point.
Feeding a growing population across Africa will take more food, grown and moved more efficiently. It will also take food that people can trust. Innovation that helps us find problems earlier, see risk more clearly and build capable teams is how we nourish tomorrow.
So this World Food Day, I’d like to ask something of everyone in our industry: farmers, processors, retailers, caterers, regulators and suppliers. Pick one part of your food safety system and ask honestly whether it is still fit for the risks you face today. If it isn’t, let’s talk.
You can reach our team at enquiries@assurecloud.co.za or +27 87 330 3792, or visit www.assurecloud.co.za.
