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Food Focus May 2008

New Zealand Food Safety Authority

May 2008

Editorial

“In identifying these three strategic outcomes, we believe we have given our work a very clear direction and focus for the foreseeable future.”

Come July we will be celebrating our first birthday as a stand-alone department. As part of the process of establishing ourselves as a separate government agency, we have recently refined our strategic framework to more clearly define our outcomes and how we will go about measuring them.

We have identified three major outcomes NZFSA needs to focus on to achieve government priorities:

1. improved safety and suitability food, ie protecting consumers from risks in our food supply

2. improved business opportunities through safe and suitable food, ie businesses are able to take up opportunities because they are underpinned by a world-class, responsive and cost-effective regulatory framework

3. consumer food practices and choices that support better health, ie all New Zealanders practise safe food handling and choose food that leads to better health.

Achieving these for New Zealand will of course depend on a lot of other factors besides our input, but we will make a significant contribution.

Together, these outcomes clearly describe our work and show our stakeholders what we are seeking to achieve. However, in selecting them – including one about improved business opportunities – we recognised the challenge we face in making it clear that these are all still about the safety and well-being of consumers of New Zealand food, whether here or overseas.

We occasionally hear that people perceive a clash between our public health goals and those for business. The implication being that, in seeking to improve outcomes for business, we will trade off the needs of consumers in favour of those business needs.

This could not be more wrong – consumer safety is our top priority. But to achieve this we work with the food industry so we can be confident that our regulatory programme is delivering safe food in the most cost-effective and practical way possible.

We know that any compliance costs we add will ultimately be borne by consumers, so these costs must be justified and must address real risks.

Our people need to know how industries operate to be sure their systems will work in practice. Writing out standards and sending them off without knowing what they mean in the food processing environment is not how we operate. We work alongside industry groups to develop, implement and monitor our programmes.

Whether we are completely overhauling the entire food regulatory programme, as we have been doing with the Domestic Food Review, or addressing a new or emerging risk, these two principles of ensuring safe food while being aware of the impact of changes on our food industries are top of mind.

Our third outcome, which is slightly different, gives a higher profile to the work we do in providing information to help consumers make safe food decisions and healthy food choices. This is an exciting concept for us and we have been increasing our efforts year by year. We now provide a vast array of information to an ever increasing stakeholder group.

Our handbook for pregnant women goes to nearly every new mum in the country and we know it is helping them to make safer food choices. Our new booklet giving advice on how to read food labels makes it easier for people to make healthy food choices. Clean/Cook/Cover/Chill material is improving food handling practices and contributing to key parts of our work programme, such as the Campylobacter strategy.

In looking hard at ourselves and seeking to clearly describe what it is we want to achieve, we think we have come up with three outcomes that will serve us, all consumers of New Zealand foods and our industry stakeholders well over the foreseeable future.

Andrew McKenzie