Improving food quality and safety by HACCP and reducing costs of the organic food chain (subproject 6)
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HACCP protocols and manuals for six commodities (wheat, field vegetables, apples, milk, eggs, pork meat) are being developed within the QLIF project. These HACCP based quality assurance systems address both (a) minimizing food safety and quality hazards and (b) ensuring maximum desirable quality characteristics demanded by the market.
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The focus on ensuring ‘added value’ quality characteristics (in particular nutritional composition) is a major difference to conventional HACCP systems, but essential for consumer confidence in organic standards.
In some cases, organic production and processing standards are quite complex and demanding, and open to error. Such complex situations (e.g. with different conversion periods in animal and crop production and different rules for annual and perennial crops) are best addressed by the establishment of a detailed customized HACCP system (see Knight and Stanley, 2007).
Economic performance of different food chains
The goal to analyse the economic performance of different food chains on a European scale was ambitious. Case studies have been performed with wheat, tomatoes, apples, milk, pork and eggs.
In a first round of semi-structured interviews with enterprise managers (SWOT analysis) economic problems of the food chains were analysed. Weak points of European organic food supply chains were high logistic and transport cost, high input costs and low expenditure on research and product development.
As the organic food market is a niche (1% of the total EU market), there is on the individual company level no benefit from economies of scale. A key strategy for companies in order to reduce costs would therefore be improved co-operation (see Stolze et al., 2007).
References
Knight, C., Stanley, R. (2007) HACCP based quality assurance systems for organic food production systems. In: Niggli, U. et al. (Eds) (2007): Proceedings of the 3rd International Congress of the European Integrated Project Quality Low Input Food (QLIF). FiBL, Frick, Switzerland
Stolze, M., Bahrdt, K., Bteich, M.R., Lampkin, N., Naspetti, S., Nicholas, P., Paladini, M.E., Zanoli, R. (2007) Strategies to improve quality and safety and reduce costs along the food supply chain. In: Niggli, U. et al. (Eds) (2007): Proceedings of the 3rd International Congress of the European Integrated Project Quality Low Input Food (QLIF). FiBL, Frick, Switzerland
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