Study Leads To Food Safety And Quality Decisions
By Jim Prevor, Editor-in-Chief, Produce Business
The difficulty of sustaining optimal temperatures in open cases is well recognized. In floral, for decades now there is substantial evidence that the quality and life of cut flowers and floral arrangements are optimized by displaying the flowers and arrangements behind closed doors.
Yet, though some floral departments use closed-door displays and others may have a closed-door display for expensive or pre-ordered arrangements, there are far more flowers in open refrigerated cases than closed and quite a large number of floral displays not in refrigeration at all. The reason is that these are supermarkets, not museums; the goal is not the preservation of flowers but their sale. Even if shrink could be reduced via the use of the closed-door cases, the goal is not to minimize shrink; the goal is to maximize profits and it is, of course, easy to imagine scenarios in which an open, easier-to-access display maximizes sales and profits while simultaneously increasing shrink.
Over the long term, however, closed-door cases, which sustain the cold chain and thus quality, could actually boost sales. Presently, consumers may not buy flowers or produce; they might limit what they are willing to buy because they have long experience that makes them feel these products have a limited shelf life in the home. If closed-door cases sustain the cold chain — delivering products that will last longer at home — consumers might be more likely to purchase and might be willing to pay a higher price. It could take a very long time before consumers make a connection between a closed-door display case and more useful life with floral or produce. After years of telling growers what to do, this study pretty well lays out what retailers need to do. Perhaps the government will eventually require closed-door refrigeration compliance. If not, one wonders if energy efficiency and moral requirements will be sufficient to make retailers move on this issue. Retailers that choose not to invest in closed-door cases for their fresh-cuts are consciously deciding to sell their customers product that is of lower quality and more likely to carry a foodborne illness.
In this case, there is a distinction between the argument for closed-door cases in produce as opposed to floral. In floral, we are talking about a strictly commercial decision. We ask questions such as: Does the closed-door case depress sales; does overall profitability rise due to energy savings and less shrink, or does profitability fall due to lower sales? When we turn to produce, and specifically fresh-cuts, we have two other concerns. One is a legal requirement for retailers to maintain temperatures in accordance with the FDA’s U.S. Food Code, and one is a moral obligation to do all that can reasonably be done to avoid selling food that could cause foodborne illness.
It would be interesting to have a good study on the impact on sales by switching to closed-door cases. It may well be that fresh-cuts are more of a shopping list item than, say, a bouquet of flowers, so sales may not suffer much or at all.
Indeed, if consumers perceive the cases to keep food fresher, the closed-door cases might increase sales, but that is research for another day.
For now, retailers are stuck with this persuasive study and its implications. Namely that retailers that choose not to invest in closed-door cases for their fresh-cuts are consciously deciding to sell their customers product that is of
lower quality and more likely to carry a foodborne illness.
More broadly, this study points to a pivot point in food safety and produce. Ever since the Spinach Crisis of 2006, the focus has been on buyer-directed food safety programs. These programs involved retailers directing producers to meet certain food safety standards. This study argues retailers need to turn their attention inward to how their own practices contribute to food-safety risk.
Retailers would argue that the fault is always with producers. After all, if no pathogen is in the package, then the fact that pathogens can grow more quickly at higher temperatures is not relevant. There is something to this argument, but less than it seems at first glance. Food safety is a difficult subject to produce precisely because our knowledge is imperfect. There is no known set of standards that can guarantee safe produce, so the smart thing to do is use multiple levels of protection: proper growing standards to reduce the likelihood of field contamination; good manufacturing practices so that processing plants are likely to remove any pathogens that exist; cold chain management along the entire supply chain to inhibit growth of pathogens; and consumer education and outreach, so they don’t cross-contaminate, use product past appropriate dates or abuse the cold chain at home.