Risk management

When horse DNA was found in frozen beef burgers and ready meals at the beginning of the year, the meat industry was thrown into turmoil. Suppliers and retailers withdrew millions of products, hundreds of SKUs were rushed into labs for DNA tests, and sales in many meat categories took a beating.

Since those manic weeks back in January and February, the meat industry has made considerable changes to the way it operates – most notably, speciation tests have become much more routine. But the legacy of the horsemeat scandal is not limited to the meat industry: it has put risk and supply chain management firmly on the agenda in all food sectors.

This is true of dairy as much any other food sector. But UK dairy suppliers, producers and retailers have perhaps more reason than other parts of the food industry to be alive to risk at the moment. They need only look to New Zealand, where dairy giant Fonterra was recently caught up in a highly damaging contamination scare involving baby formula (a false alarm, as it turned out), to remind themselves that dairy isn’t immune from food scares.

Then there’s the tricky business of managing the PR fallout from the badger cull that has just got underway; growing interest in potentially risky raw milk products; and the removal of EU dairy quotas in 2015. The dairy industry is certainly not short of potentially thorny issues that could put its reputation and future sustainability at risk.

But which of these risks should the industry be most concerned about, and what strategies might it use to mitigate them? And how vulnerable is the UK dairy supply chain to an adulteration scandal like horsegate?

We picked the brains of industry experts and risk management specialists to find out, and our findings are published in our Dairymen supplement this Saturday (7 September).

However, if you’re a digital subscriber, you can get full access to the feature today, by logging in HERE.

Make sure you don’t miss on our other Dairymen subscriber specials, including our exclusive Big Interview with Dairy Crest CEO Mark Allen, our feature on the growing role of pound shops in the liquid milk sector, and our two exclusive Cheddar category reports.