Every great professional I have ever worked with had the ability to look beyond their nose. In other words, they do not rely just on their historical issues as found in their facilities or from customers.
With food adulteration, the bar is significantly raised when identifying hazards to prevent with the food safety program. What can happen, how, where, when, etc. Then how would you detect or prevent it without spending huge sums of money? Food Fraud can be just as damaging to a company. What would you do or how would you avoid having “fake” products labeled with your brand information?
Horizon scanning is both educational and fun. The United States used to be quite a “fun” place for adulteration, less fun now with increased regulations and oversight, but it still happens. When a buck can be made, people are very keen to work very hard to find ways to produce a cheaper product to sell with a higher margin. It is as if they have a Black Belt in 6 Sigma and apply it to cost reduction only with no rules.
Checking out the whats and hows in high import alert and refusal products and countries can provide incredible insight into the minds of adulterators. Regional investigative reports are also invaluable sources of data to drive hazard and risk identification. Remember history repeats itself with food adulteration, if it worked once, it can work again, with just a little twist to confuse the testing laboratories.
Those industries that have to manage sourcing high-risk products from high-risk countries have developed great programs to identify and prevent these hazards. A great example would be the leading manufacturers in the spice industry. But through it all, one of the best control methods is to control your supply chain as much as possible and to have experts involved all through the supply chain.
But like the dog that caught the car, now what do you do with the hazard? Where would you create and implement your preventive measures for Food Adulteration or Fraud? In HACCP/HARPC? Food Defense? Why? Anywhere else.