E X E C U T I V E D I R E C T O R : Nearly four years at Asia Pacific Centre for Food Integrity B A C K G R O U N D : Oritain Global founder, Institute of Environmental Science and Research director, Export NZ advisory board member, US Pharmacopeial Convention food adulteration expert panel member C O M PA N Y : Commercialisation of food integrity services and application of technology to enhance global food supply chains. A recent Innovation Center survey in the United States has found that 7% of respondents believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows. Asia Pacific Centre for Food Integrity Dr Helen Darling says New Zealand food manufacturers should be very concerned by that statistic and think about ways to educate consumers about the food they eat. It would be endearing if this survey was Dr Helen Darling A U C K L A N D 50 years ago and completed by small children…but it was earlier this year and undertaken by 1000 adults. These results are not so extraordinary, however. The UK farming charity LEAF in 2011 found that 15% of adults did not know that a dairy cow was female. These are extreme examples but they do demonstrate that basic food production processes may not be as well understood by the general public as they are by those working within the food industry. When we overlay nutritional, geographical origin, transportation, storage and preparation information, and use data on top of basic food facts (for example, milk is from cows or honey is from bees), we are creating a complex array of information. To assume that all can understand it is, at best, a little arrogant. The clean label movement in the US is driven by a need to demystify food labels and drive transparency in the food industry; arguably with ‘cleaning’ the label being a proxy for educating consumers. However, as farming becomes even more distant from the consumer, the risk is that clean labels do not actually achieve the desired level of transparency when the inability to understand these labels may be based more on a lack of fundamental knowledge about food than on how ingredients or nutritional information are reported. The 2016 Label Insight Transparency ROI Study found that 39% of consumers would switch brands if they perceived greater transparency in a competing brand, and 94% were more likely to be loyal to a brand that was transparent. That study defined a transparent brand as “one that provides all information about a food or personal care product to allow shoppers to determine for themselves if the product fits their needs.” As consumers can’t judge what they don’t know, then the transparency drivers are most likely to be social value issues like free-range, organic, non-GMO, nutritional or allergy drivers like low salt or gluten free. So, how do you improve supply chain transparency, make a more informed consumer, and encourage a greater demand for high-quality food products? The Asia Pacific Centre for Food Integrity believes that there are gaps in knowledge about food fundamentals and that, to achieve gains in food integrity, we need to do something about those gaps. It would be ridiculous to think that we could educate everyone. Nevertheless, we saw an opportunity to create resources that could illustrate basic food production and supply chain facts. So much effort is going into making food production safer and food products more transparent, and yet very little effort appears to be going into raising the baseline food knowledge that consumers have. Without raising this baseline, all initiatives to improve food integrity run the risk of becoming marketing spin. To address this perceived lack of knowledge, we decided to create resources that enabled conversations about food production. It was important to also demonstrate supply chains – to show that there are, generally, multiple players that enable food to get from producer to home. The hypothesis is that you can not talk about food integrity when very basic concepts of food production are not understood. Based on this premise, we have developed three books for young children, focusing on ‘easy readers’ and designed to be read by parents and children, with the stories integrating food production, food supply chains and subtle food safety information in a repeatable, incremental ‘House that Jack built’ format. The stories are supported by attractive, colourful illustrations that show a typical international supply chain; to date the books are on honey, dairy (cow’s milk), and orange juice, and we have further stories in the pipeline. The books have been translated into Mandarin and therefore have the potential dual function as an early language reader. All three books are available from www.asiapacificfoodintegrity.com in printed bound format with a small charge to cover costs. S E V E R A L S E T S O F B O O K S P R O D U C E D B Y A S I A P A C I F I C C E N T R E F O R F O O D I N T E G R I T Y A B O U T W H E R E F O O D C O M E S F R O M W I L L B E S E N T T O S E L E C T E D R E A D E R S
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