Peter Stevens.
OPINION: Food quality and food safety are huge concerns in China. New Zealand businesses must share those concerns if they are to continue growing the volume and value of their food and beverages sold to the increasingly affluent Chinese public.
We might think New Zealand milk products, meat, wine, honey and so on are world-leading on quality and safety. But what actually matters is our capacity for maintaining and protecting the quality and safety of every shipment to China.
In short, New Zealand producers and exporters need to get really serious about the ‘‘T’’ word. Traceability in its fullest sense is the capacity to track and trace every batch of a product (and perhaps every item in the batch)
Kiwi food exporters need to get serious about the ‘T’ word: traceability, writes
for rapid recall if needed, and to provide discerning consumers with all the answers about the product when it is on offer to them.
Food safety has long been a huge issue in China, fuelled by repeated instances of food contamination, fraudulent labelling and regulatory incompetence or corruption. In the Pew Research Centre’s 2016 survey of Chinese public opinion, 40 per cent of respondents said the safety of food was ‘‘a very big problem’’.
That is reflected in Beijing’s new Food Safety Act, under implementation since October 2015. This law puts much greater responsibility on producers and supply chains, consistent with China becoming a more consumeroriented market and more open to a multitude of foreign suppliers.
The biggest New Zealand exporters to China are, of course, acutely aware of public sentiment there. The dairy industry in particular has come a long way since the 2008 melamine milk contamination crisis, in which Fonterra’s then-partner Sanlu was implicated.
These days New Zealand dairy plants producing infant formula for the Chinese market are subject to regular inspection by officials the China Certification and Inspection Group (CCIG), and the brands open to importation are tightly restricted.
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