All Food Chain Participants Responsible for Food Safety

Ensuring a safe food supply is the responsibility of every participant along the food chain from the farmer to the the restaurant and every where in between. Alltech Chief Innovation Officer Aidan Connolly says that most farmers are well aware of the importance of food safety and vigilance needed to ensure a safe food supply
Connolly: “Consumers have come to expect safe food. That is a minimum expectation they have. Wonderfully we’ve delivered on that but all parts of the food chain have to deliver on that.”
Connolly says there are lessons to be learned from Chipotle’s handling of their food safety issues
Connolly: “Well, it is easy to criticize something from the outside but honestly for me Chipotle is a company that was ignoring the signs. When you have six separate food crisis in the space of five months, when you get 500 people sick, when you have totally different incidences and in this case totally different types of bacteria and totally different types of illnesses all occurring one after the other it’s just clear that you have a systemic problem. I think it has taken them a blatantly a long time to realize that. I think they carry a lot in terms of their brand — it is a very powerful brand. Again I just think that the consumers have just come to expect — and rightly so — that the food supply in the United States is extremely safe. When a company — even a beloved company like Chipotle — don’t respect that I think they get punished as we’ve seen in their share prices and sale of their food.”