An obsession with safety in manufacturing has resulted in a food supply that arguably is the best in the world and certainly much improved from the not-too-distant past. In food and beverage companies, systems and technology to improve safety may be the only expenditures where ROI seldom if ever is discussed.
The same cannot be said about quality. A quality product necessarily is a safe product, but the reverse cannot be said: Just because chemical, biological or other contaminants are absent doesn’t mean it is a quality product. Yet the cost of poor quality likely is greater than the cost of compromised safety.
The worst-case outcome of a safety breach is a public health event that sickens or kills people, triggering a recall and damaging confidence in a brand or a manufacturer. By their nature, these are isolated events and anomalies; an organization with chronic food safety problems is unlikely to stay in business for long. Quality issues, on the other hand, can persist for years, resulting in uncalculated losses in scrap, rework and buyers who abandon the product because it fails to deliver the same taste, texture or other characteristics consistently.