Thank you very much for the privilege and honour of appearing before this subcommittee to share some of my thoughts on food safety. I've included—and I guess it will go with the transcript—a little biography, because I didn't want to take up too much time, but I do have to mention that I'm a professional meat scientist and also work in food safety and quality. I should mention that I'm one of the few PhDs in the country, and that stands for “packing house doctor”.
I have more than 50 years of experience associated with the meat industry, most of that in Canada. I actually learned to cut meat and butcher, make sausage, cure, and all that at a university, something that is hard to do in this country. I've worked both in academia and in industry. I worked in industry for the last 15 years as vice-president of food safety and technical services before I retired in 2004. And I retired not by choice, but our company was bought by a large multinational.
I continue to do food safety audits and evaluations and advise on the related problems.
So what I'm going to try to tell you—it's a little different tack here—is a little bit about Caravelle Foods, the company I worked for, because it has some unique characteristics. Initially, Caravelle Foods went to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada--at that time, in 1989, there was no CFIA—and we asked for help in finding high-quality raw materials for our hamburgers, which we made for our one customer, which happened to be McDonald's. We made all the hamburgers for McDonald's in Canada. We had trouble finding high-quality raw material, and one of the reasons was that in the summers of 1987 and 1988, MAPAQ, which is the department of agriculture, fisheries, and food in Quebec, did some surveys on some of the hamburgers at McDonald's restaurants and found that one year they were high in salmonella and in another year they were high in E. coli. This information got back to McDonald's, who went to the owners of Caravelle Foods and told us to clean up our act or they were going to find another supplier.
Anyway, we asked for several meetings with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, and over a seven-year period we had many discussions with them. I have no proof of this, but I have a feeling we were probably the major player here that sort of pushed Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada at the time into developing a food safety program, and this is in the early nineties.
So my story is about Caravelle Foods. We had these discussions, and interestingly enough, a lot of this was taking place before the jack-in-the-box situation that happened in 1993 in the U.S. Caravelle Foods was the first plant recognized in Canada by CFIA for its food safety enhancement program. I'm sure you've heard of FSEP and you know what that is from previous discussions. In fact, we were the first meat plant in North America to be officially recognized with a HACCP plan. We did much of the early testing and, for Mr. Easter, we did pilot program work over a four-year period with CFIA, and our program was recognized in November of 1996.
I'd like to give you some highlights of our program, which impacts some of the activities that have happened over the last year. We started with a well-organized and effective manual of operating procedures, which included a sanitation monitoring program. This was not required at the time, but we decided we needed to do this, because we did find some of these organisms in our drains, on tables, and on other contact surfaces. We analyzed and monitored trends from the data we collected. So we were doing this in the middle to late nineties to identify problem areas on a regular basis. These results were reported and discussed at weekly management meetings—that is, with our top management, and they wanted to know if we were having any problems. As well, we discussed these in production meetings. Deviations were corrected as quickly as possible. We also met with our sanitation chemical supplier, who we found to be a wealth of information in solving some of our problems.
We required all our raw material suppliers to have a HACCP program. And remember that we didn't cook our product, so our finished product was only as good as our raw material. So we had to have high-quality safe raw materials in order to produce a high-quality safe finished product, even though it was cooked at the McDonald's restaurants. At that time there were over a thousand in Canada, and sometimes there were problems in getting standardized cooking procedures. They've worked on that, and that takes place now. I personally audited all our suppliers. We started out with 28 suppliers in Canada and, a sign of the times, when I retired we only had six suppliers. We notified our suppliers when there were deviations in raw materials and expected them to correct the deficiencies in a timely manner.
We notified our CFIA inspector when we had a result that significantly impacted the quality or safety of our raw material or finished product. It was understood that our inspector, who was responsible for several plants—and you've heard this before, that one inspector has several plants—would know that we would contact her even if she was not present in our plant.
Our one and only customer, McDonald's, spent less and less time in the plant over the course of the 15 years I was with the company because they knew our food safety and quality program worked and was successful.
A food safety culture was established at Caravelle Foods. You need a well-written and executed program. We have these in Canada, but you have to have the support of all employees. This is where the employees participate and take some responsibility in executing the program. This took some time to establish but was key in the development of a successful program. I've listed some of the attributes, which included supportive and committed management; excellent leadership with a value of trust; consistent behaviour among all employees; education of employees, which is very important so they know why you're doing things as well as training them to know how to do it; team effort.... We worked together for example in cleaning our patty machines, which were as complicated as the slicers, and we had a team of maintenance, production people as well as our sanitation crew, work of these on a nightly basis to make sure the equipment was cleaned properly. We had empowerment and engagement of all employees who shared responsibilities and ideas and communicated openly and freely. Of course, we had cooperation; we had open and effective communication. And we had a rewards system to recognize performance and support. Praise is the grease that kindles the human spirit. It went a long way to contributing to the success of our program, and it doesn't cost much.
The crowning feature was Caravelle Foods was recognized with the Black Pearl Award for outstanding commitment to and achievement of corporate excellence in food quality and safety in 1999. This was presented by the International Association for Food Protection. It was the very first company in Canada to win this award.
What do we need to improve Canada's food safety system? I'm sure you're all waiting to hear what my comments are on that.
We need to encourage the development of a food safety culture in all our plants as well as in the CFIA organization.
We need better-trained inspectors. We used to train our inspectors by either sending them into the plant to work a while or they used to have short courses throughout the year. I remember training some inspectors in how to clean a band saw and how to make sausage so they had hands-on experience. This is very important, I think, if you're going to do a good job of inspecting. It would be advantageous for all of us to have a post-secondary educational background, but all need not be veterinarians. There should be opportunities for animal scientists, food scientists, microbiologists, and biologists. Some could also be graduates of community colleges in specially designed technical support programs for the food industry.
Baseline studies are needed to measure the occurrence of indicator and pathogenic organisms in our raw materials and finished products. This will help us evaluate our food chain food safety systems, such as on the farm that we've heard about, all the way through to the consumer, and would include traceability.