July 21st, 2007
NRN Food Safety Roundtable 2003: protection of food supply moves to front burner at annual forum - Special Report: Food Safety - Nation’s Restaurant News - Panel Discussion
Food safety used to be just that — handling and preparing food free of germs and other contaminants and having people trained to embrace the highest standards of hygiene and cleanliness serve it.
But when anthrax was sent through the mail just a few weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, killing five random people and exposing the soft underbelly of the nation’s food supplies to bioterrorism, restaurants added to their food safety procedures an appendage called food security.
The deliberate tampering of food with the intent to kill, injure or wreak economic havoc is light-years different from the accidental or natural contamination of food. Preventing those two occurences was front-of-mind for several restaurant food safety experts who participated in an annual food safety discussion during the recent National Restaurant Association Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show in Chicago.
Presented by Nation’s Restaurant News and sponsored by Colgate-Palmolive Co., the Food Safety Roundtable included Mike Starnes, vice president of food safety, quality assurance and brand standards for Denny’s Inc., Spartanburg, S.C.; Brad Lutz, vice president of people and learning for Dallas-based Romacorp Inc., parent company of Tony Roma’s barbecue chain; Tom Gribben, director of research and development, Columbus, Ohio-based Damon’s International Inc.; Adam Ashcraft, food safety adviser, Colgate-Palmolive Co., New York; Chet England, senior director and chief food safety officer for Miami-based Burger King Corp.; Greg Hernandez, vice president of food services and purchasing, Ruby Restaurant Group, the Newport Beach, Calif.-based parent of the 25-unit Ruby’s Diner chain; and Aftan Romanczak, director of research and development and purchasing for Steak-Out Franchising Inc., Norcross, Ga.
Milford Prewitt, national reports editor for NRN, moderated the panel.
NRN: Burger King’s Chet England gave an impressive overview of Burger King’s food security protocols at the National Food Safety Summit in March. Chet, could you get us started with a little recap?
ENGLAND, BURGER KING: Well, as many of you know, we’ve had some management changes, and our former management came to us from the airline industry. Our CEO and various other executives were senior management at Northwest Airlines. And I think one of the things that the airline industry, for all of its other issues, one of the things that it does understand, especially post 9/11, is security.
I’m a microbiologist. I’ve dealt with food safety for my entire career, but I’ve never dealt with the threat and the issue of food security that now comes before us.
So one of the first things I did was assemble a team - a multifunctional team of all of the stakeholders around the company — to look at this threat and see what it meant to our business.
Operations people, purchasing people, people from supply management, legal, etc., all came together, and after intense discussion on this issue, we determined there were four areas we needed to focus on.
[First,] the supply chain, to make sure that we are getting secure products moving through our chain, and that’s no small challenge with a company that does over $3 billion of procurement a year. We needed to protect our operations — no small challenge when you’re working with 12,000 restaurants in 58 countries, many in unstable parts of the world. We needed to protect our corporate offices, because back then, before 9/11, we had two offices and were in the process of moving from one to the other. Finally, there was the information infrastructure. This has always been an issue with any major corporation, but we had to pay even greater attention.
We realized none of us were experts in any of this, so we turned to a fairly major law firm operating in the United States with a security division in security consulting. They were extremely knowledgeable in counterterrorism. Antiterrorism, I learned, is different from counterterrorism, and they gave us a lot of excellent guidance.
Our task was to harden what they call in the intelligence field a “soft target,” like hotels, offices and retail outlets.
NRN: Can you tell us some specific things you did on the unit level?
ENGLAND, BURGER KING: Obviously, I’m a bit leery about talking in great detail about something that’s going to get published. We recognized there were limits to what we could do when you are in the business of inviting people into your business. But I would encourage anyone to limit access to the back-of-the-house.
In the front-of-the-house, we looked at employee screening, and that is a monster. But more important, we dealt with things that are accessible to consumers, like self-service drinks or condiment systems.
HERNANDEZ, RUBY’S: The back-of-the-house was a big issue for us, too. One of the things that we were doing is trying to assess who was coming into the buildings, whether it’s delivery people, drivers of trucks and so on.
And one of the alarming things that we realize is, other than the armored-car people, we have really no way to know exactly that the person who’s delivering our produce or our bread is really the right person.