Daily Lessons from Life 21 July 2014 - China shuts meat producer supplying McDonald's, KFC

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"China shuts meat producer supplying McDonald's, KFC - AFP 21 July 2014

SHANGHAI - Shanghai has shut a factory of US food provider OSI Group for selling out-of-date meat to restaurant giants including McDonald's and KFC, authorities said Monday, in China's latest food safety scandal.

A Shanghai television channel, which reported the original allegations, said that workers at the plant mixed expired meat with the fresh product and deliberately misled quality inspectors from McDonald's.

City officials closed the Shanghai Husi Food Co. factory on Sunday and seized products which allegedly used the expired meat, the Shanghai food and drug administration said in a statement.

Police were investigating, it said, threatening "severe punishment" in future. Television footage showed workers in white suits picking up meat and hamburger patties from the floor before putting them back into processing machinery, and one employee handling out-of-date beef and calling it "stinky meat".

McDonald's said in a statement it had "immediately" stopped using the factory's products while restaurant operator Yum separately said its KFC and Pizza Hut establishments had also halted use of its meat. KFC has faced food safety issues in China before, when authorities found excessive levels of antibiotics in chicken it sourced from local suppliers in 2012.

Other customers of Husi Food included Burger King, Papa John's Pizza and coffee chain Starbucks, the Shanghai Daily newspaper reported Monday. Furniture maker Ikea, which had been named by Chinese media as serving the factory's meat at in-store restaurants, said it stopped using the company's products last year, and sandwich maker Subway also denied it uses meat from the firm.

China has been rocked by a series of food and product safety problems, due to lax enforcement of regulations and corner-cutting by producers.

One of the worst occurred in 2008 when the industrial chemical melamine was found to have been illegally added to dairy products, killing at least six babies and making 300,000 people ill. US retail giant Walmart said early this year that it would tighten inspections of its suppliers in China after it was forced to recall donkey meat products that had been found to contain fox. Last year, China detained hundreds of people for food safety crimes, including selling rat and fox meat disguised as beef and mutton, following a three-month crackdown, police said."

So it is BUSINESS AS USUAL for food safety scandals in China!

Lessons for me are:

1. when profit is the overriding priority and focus of 'management' or business owners, anything goes! This factory is supposed to be a China subsidiary of a USA company, Osi Group. By all account, it should be very strict about food safety issue UNLESS we were all misled and mistaken to believe that USA companies are MORE ethical and have established processes to ensure compliance??!!;

2. it is very conceivable that other suppliers are probably doing the same thing and hoping their luck are better than this Osi factory!! It will be impossible to monitor the safety of the foods IF the food processing companies, their management and their workers are NOT into food safety. This is especially so for the management as they lead the charge and also have the means to influence the behaviours of the employees through the rewards system. If the management is pushing the workers to cut corners and make more money, it is a lot harder for the workers to push back. So, in such incident the management always have to take bigger share of responsibilities!;

3. what next food safety in China? Will the systemic malaise be eradicated totally? Can it be done? The answer has to be: YES. It can be eradicated and it can be done. Otherwise, everyone will just fall over and play dead! Sometimes, 'we deserved what we did not fight for!'. As with all social ills, there must be people at the working level feeling uncomfortable and indignant that such wrongs are been perpetrated. They want to change for the better. In such a delicate situation, when the leaders take up the cause and rally the troops at the right time, the momentum to want to change can be quickly built up. When leaders lead the charge, the chances for succeeding normally go up by a few percentage points.

Almost everyone consumed ready packed, ready cooked and processed food items. To be safe at the source and key processing areas in the value chain is just the right thing to expect and to achieve!

Glad that I don't do fast food that much - in China or Singapore!