There was a time a few years back when you could have won easy money by betting on at least one reference to the Mandarin word for ‘crisis’ turning up in any conference presentation. You see, the little Chinese character for crisis also contains the character for ‘opportunity’.
Many of Europe’s leading companies were in Rotterdam attending this year’s FRESH when news of the first deaths from the E coli crisis in northern Germany were reported. Cucumbers were to blame, we were informed, as the market went into a freefall and key Dutch delegates hurried off to crisis meetings.
Appropriately enough, Europe’s annual fresh produce conference had just completed a session on the challenge of raising consumption, listening to LazyTown’s Magnús Scheving present a very persuasive case on how to counter falling demand for fresh produce. Suddenly, it all seemed a bit superfluous.
‘Sportacus’, the adventure hero whose top-rated TV programmes have been turning pre-school children into fresh fruit and vegetable eaters, represents a very real opportunity for the business at large to improve sales of its products.
But with one eye on news reports – and here’s a typical example from one of the UK’s biggest selling newspapers bit.ly/jKxLxN – you can understand why so many shoppers left fresh fruit and vegetables on their supermarket shelves.
The story since then is well-known and covered in detail elsewhere in this issue: around 40 dead and thousands of people hospitalised as the fresh produce market in Germany plunges almost 50 per cent, cucumber growers in Spain and the Netherlands see their sales collapse, Russia and other countries block fresh vegetable imports from the EU, and the governments of Germany and Spain are at loggerheads.
At the Fresh Convenience Congress in London in mid-June, Freshfel Europe’s Fréderic Rosseneu delivered a succinct overview (bit.ly/lj1gBi) of the crisis and discussed its implications with United Fresh president Tom Stenzel and Eurofruit editor Mike Knowles, among others.
Although no two crises are the same, it’s clear that all crises have similarities. We need to learn from them. It goes without saying that it’s vital for the handling of the next emergency – and there will be one, that much is certain – that we take lessons onboard. We also need to make changes. This is the opportunity part of crisis.
On food safety and traceability, the E coli crisis reinforces their fundamental importance to the future of our business. We are bound to see new calls for even further regulation in Germany, if not elsewhere in Europe, with government and food retailers leading the charge. Berlin is already under attack for its botched handling of the crisis, an unfortunate but perhaps inevitable result of the federal system of government that operates in Germany.
Our sector must get closer to the relevent food safety authorities so that it can advise quickly how produce is distributed and help to trace the root of the problem. The trade knew early on that Spanish cucumbers couldn’t be the source because their distribution would have resulted in more cases over a much wider area.
As for news and information, it seems to me we could do more to put our side of the story to the national media. We were overwhelmed by the demand. So we need to develop better, deeper relationships with news organisations. We need to get our message out more effectively and in a much more co-ordinated manner.
Let us please agree a crisis-management plan, back it with contingency funding, and get ready for the next time something like this happens.
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