The trouble with the U.S. food supply

By The Wall Street Journal

Published: Nov 21, 2016 12:59 p.m. ET

Most of the time we have no idea where our food comes from

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A farmer harvests avocados in Mexico. The U.S. buys most of the Mexican avocado production.

The food industry has become so globalized that much of the U.S. public doesn’t even know where its food comes from, much less whether it is safe.

Randall K. Fields, CEO of ReposiTrak Inc., a company that helps retailers and suppliers in the food, pharmaceutical and supplements industries comply with federal requirements, sat down with John Bussey, associate editor of The Wall Street Journal, at the Journal’s recent Global Food Forum to discuss some of the challenges. Edited excerpts follow.

Bussey: If I presented you with a head of lettuce in a package that said organic, would you as a consumer be interested, or would you see it as a lethal weapon?

Fields: It’s much closer to the latter than the former. Most heads of lettuce have relatively indeterminate origin. So, for people who know too much about the supply chain, it’s not something you’d be willing to eat without a lot more knowledge.

In supermarkets and other retail food sources, they don’t have a lot of transparency in their supply chain. Their job is to keep a product on the shelf. So if they’re short on cantaloupe, their buyers will call the broker who in turn will find cantaloupe. Maybe it comes from a farm that they should be doing business with, and maybe not. Because of the opacity of the supply chain, the risks are higher than any of us would like.

It’s going to get fixed. It’s either going to get fixed because, under the new Food Safety Modernization Act [signed into law in 2011], the Food and Drug Administration and their partners at the Department of Justice will dress a few executives up in orange and silver, or because there’s pressure from retailers—we see that—to improve the compliance and safety of the supply chain. That’s the only way it’s going to work. Consumers can’t get it done.

Bussey: What are companies doing right or wrong in analyzing their sourcing?

Fields: We’ve been disappointed at the general level of compliance to basic standards across the industry. If you take a look at all the facilities that are actually food-safety audited, it’s 10% to 12% of all the facilities registered with the Food and Drug Administration. And there’s a lot of companies that do business that aren’t registered.

So, in terms of a safe practice and audit, not enough of that is being done. It’s so paper-intensive when you have thousands of suppliers, it just hasn’t been done till now. The consequence is an unsupervised supply chain. Not everywhere. Many companies do this just right. But in general, there’s not enough compliance.

Bussey: A majority of Americans say they would not buy a food product from China. But a lot of our food comes from China. People just are not aware of where their food comes from, right?

Fields: Absolutely correct. We [Americans] eat on average 2,000 pounds of food per person per year. That’s a big number. Almost 400 pounds of that comes from outside the U.S. one way or another. And because of these multiple points of distribution where a grower in China sends it to a broker in China, who sells it to a broker in Europe, who then sends it to the U.S., there’s absolutely no way to know where that came from.

Here’s a stunning fact: Seventy-some-odd percent of the ingredients that go into supplements and vitamins are sourced in China or India. How many of you will now quit?

Mark Baum, with the Food Marketing Institute: As an industry, we’re only as strong as our weakest link. So, in an era where we’re sourcing more globally, and locally — because of consumer preferences — that exposes us. What can we as an industry do to advance a culture of food safety throughout the supply chain?

Fields: If I were CEO of a food firm, the food-safety person in my company would become an officer and a direct report. He or she would become as important to me as my general counsel. I would give him the ability to pull on the cord of the bus and stop the bus at any moment. Until that’s done, honestly, we don’t have a culture of food safety.