Thinking One Step Ahead!

I’ve started doing Pilates and for 20 odd minutes a day I’m working those core muscles! The reason I’m subjecting myself to this exercise is the realisation that if I want to keep gardening and lifting my grandson in the future, I’ll better stay in shape. I’m sort of thinking one step ahead!

Thinking one step ahead appears to be one of my default modes. Apparently, I was doing it from a very young age, illustrated by my mother’s favourite anecdote of 3-year-old Jack saying: “Mum, I closed the gate, otherwise I might run away!”.

Interestingly, we tend to believe that others are wired the same way as we do, and it took me a long time to realise that “thinking one step ahead” is not a universal human trait. Now that I’m older, I actually believe that “thinking one step ahead” is rather rare and humans are more inclined to “dealing with the problem” (or firefighting in factory language).

So what has this got to do with food safety!?

Well, many senior food executives I talk to these days, express their desire for predictive technologies, so they don’t get to the “dealing with the food safety problem” stage. I guess this desire is fed by the advances in data processing and the rise of Artificial Intelligence. However, despite our significant progress in these areas, prediction remains, in the words of Niels Bohr: “very difficult, especially if it is about the future!" and the most advanced predictive models (like weather forecasts) require a lot of data and accurate data at that.

And data, is an area that our food industry is not that good at. Yes, we are collecting data, but using this data is often an afterthought. Some years back, our company conducted a survey, which showed that over 50% of laboratory test results in the food industry is still manually (paper!) processed or captured in isolated spreadsheets (good luck Chatgpt).

So, whilst we have a wish for prediction, the reality is that we are not there (yet); which brings me to “thinking one step ahead” or the preventive mindset. To me, prevention is much more obtainable than prediction, because prevention is using “best practices” and learning, to strengthen our food safety systems.

In food factories, prevention starts with the design and implementation of our food safety & quality controls, the systems and procedures that protect the food we make. Our verification regime will tell us how we are tracking and the data from our verification can be used to help our preventive decision making.

For example, a risk-based and targeted environmental monitoring (verification) plan, will provide insight on the condition of our factory environment. Plotting our results on a factory map may show some opportunities for improvement (like our factory zoning controls) and addressing these opportunities may prevent a more serious problem.

Note that we still rely on the good use of data! We can make significant progress in prevention if we invest in the design of a holistic verification plan and link all our verification data. Also, our sampling & testing practices must be sound to ensure valid results, because: “good data in - means good information out”.

And guess what, once we have our “prevention” mindset sorted, I “predict” (with 80% probability) that we will avoid some major food safety problems in our factory.

Jack

Disclaimer: This article is my personal opinion and does not reflect to opinion and position of my employer(s).