The reputation of the fresh produce industry has been hurt by Germany’s E.coli tragedy. Should growers and retailers be doing more, asks Julia Glotz


Carnivores are no strangers to the occasional food safety scare.

From campylobacter, dioxin contamination and salmonella to warnings of increased cancer risks and environmental devastation, rarely a week goes by when meat is not making negative headlines.

But for the past two weeks, it has been some of our ‘healthiest’ foods raw vegetables and fresh salads that have been at the centre of a food safety storm. The blanket coverage of the deadly E. coli outbreak in Germany, which at the time of writing had claimed 25 lives and wreaked havoc on large parts of the European fresh produce industry, has again prompted soul-searching about the safety of our food.

As an exclusive survey for The Grocer by Harris International this week reveals, 38% of UK consumers now worry about the safety of fresh produce on sale in the UK and a significant number are planning to reduce the amount they eat.

So just how risky are raw vegetables and salads? And how can the industry be sure the produce it sells is safe?

Nigel Jenney at the Fresh Produce Consortium insists the safety record of the fresh produce industry speaks for itself. “The industry has very robust systems and traceability,” he says. “At this stage, it’s still not clear whether it really was produce that’s responsible for the outbreak, so the issue is less about what the industry can do and more about lingering doubt in consumers’ minds about safety if the authorities are not definitive in finding the source.”

Dr Michael Howard, a chartered environmental health practitioner and senior lecturer in environmental health at King’s College, London, is similarly emphatic. “Raw vegetables and salads in the UK are safe to eat,” he says. “The outbreak in Germany is very serious not least because the strain of E. coli is very virulent but there is no indication it has taken hold here,” he adds.

But Jamie Foster, a specialist regulatory solicitor at Clarke Willmott, points out that people eat salads raw, so E. coli would not be destroyed by cooking. “This is not to say that eating fresh produce is inherently dangerous only that risks associated with meat may have been exaggerated, while risks associated with eating salads appear to have largely been ignored.”

Even if the outbreak is ultimately traced back to fresh produce, however, the current evidence does not point to systemic failure in, say, industry hygiene practices.

The UK fresh produce industry in particular has done much to cultivate best practice over the past two decades, says David Clarke, chief executive of Assured Food Standards, which runs the Red Tractor scheme. Outbreaks like the one in Germany are exactly why the UK industry set up assured produce schemes as long as 15 years ago, he says. “We recognised the potential for contamination hazards, and we put in food safety controls at every potential weak point,” he adds. These include controls on water used for irrigation one of the ways in which experts believe E. coli may have ended up on fresh produce sold in Germany and on organic inputs such as manure.

“If you look at produce-related E. coli outbreaks in North or South America, it’s either organic inputs or dirty irrigation water that’s the cause, or it’s the hygiene of the handlers, be it in the fields or in a pack house,” says Clarke. Safety schemes and protocols first developed in the UK have since gone on to inform international standards such as GlobalGap a sign of just how far ahead of the curve the British industry has been, he adds.

But what about imports? With 62% of fruit and veg sold in the UK coming from abroad [Defra], it is not enough for British standards to be top-notch; imports, too, need to be up to scratch. Here, retailers can play an important role in raising the bar. “They are increasingly keen to use similar standards to those used in the UK on imported produce,” according to Clarke.

Even where current safety protocols are high, outbreaks like the one in Germany should give the industry pause for thought about how standards can be improved further. Although compensation claims have to date focused on public monies from the European Union rather than on private compensation sought from and for growers, suppliers or retailers, the prospect however remote of finding that produce sold on your shelves has caused people to die will send a shiver down the spine of many a store manager and supermarket CEO.

When contaminated food is sold, producers, suppliers and retailers potentially face both civil and criminal liability, says Foster at Clarke Willmott. “Who is liable entirely depends on the facts of the case, but if it’s the retailer that’s responsible for getting, say, faeces onto vegetables, or it didn’t take reasonable steps to avoid stocking contaminated produce, then they could clearly be in trouble.”

Traceability is where the biggest improvements to managing this risk can be made, especially where produce is routinely traded across borders, believes Pascal Durdu, of Zetes, a technology company that develops barcodes and other ID systems. This could be done with new technology allowing real-time tracing of individual boxes of produce, ensuring product recalls or safety warnings can be targeted precisely rather than affecting entire industries, he says.

Companies need to be prepared to invest in safety, Durdu warns. “The industry doesn’t want to spend money, but it needs to look at these systems as a kind of insurance,” he says. “As long as nothing happens, it’s a cost, but then it’s there to help you when something does happen.”

Patrick Pilz at Pilz Consulting takes a different view. It’s not on traceability, but on prevention, that efforts need to focus, he believes. “Look at what’s happening now we have traceability systems working but we don’t have sound data to find the culprits,” he says.

Systems need to be developed to allow early detection of outbreaks and analyse them without relying on sick people remembering where and what they ate, Pilz adds. But he warns that 100% safety for fresh foods “just doesn’t exist”. The industry can do a lot through testing and prevention, but there will always be a residual risk. “The alternative would be irradiation of fresh foods or other advances in cold pasteurisation,” he says.


E. coli: how common?

When German authorities told a bewildered public that the Spanish cucumbers they had tested did not carry the particular strain of E. coli responsible for the current outbreak but there was nevertheless E. coli on them consumers and industry could be forgiven for feeling queasy.

But not all E. coli types cause disease, and the presence of non-pathogenic E. coli is far from unusual, says Dr Michael Howard at King’s College University.

“It’s very difficult to eliminate completely and therefore reasonably common to find E. coli in foods,” he says. To say for sure how common non-pathogenic E. coli is would require extensive and expensive sampling, without necessarily delivering conclusive results, he adds.

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