Incidents, withdrawals and recalls

A food incident is any event that may make food unsafe or wrongly described. Examples are a missing allergen on a label, glass in a product, a chiller failure, a flood or an infestation.

A withdrawal removes unsafe food from the supply chain before it reaches consumers. A recall also tells consumers to take action, such as returning the food or throwing it away.

The law places a clear duty on you. If you believe that food you have supplied is unsafe, you must act immediately to withdraw or recall it. Tell your local authority, or the port health authority. If unsafe food may have reached consumers in England, Wales or Northern Ireland, also tell the FSA incidents team. In Scotland, tell your local authority and FSS. Scotland has its own guidance from FSS.

Do not wait for a test result if there is good reason to believe that food is unsafe. A delay can put people at risk. Under the law you must also help the authorities and your customers to deal with the problem, and pass on the information needed to trace the food.

Most supervisors will meet recalls from the receiving end. The FSA publishes Allergy Alerts, Product Recall Information Notices and Food Alerts for Action. FSS publishes alerts for Scotland too. You can sign up for them. Make one person responsible for checking alerts, with a deputy. When an alert names a product, check the name, batch code and date. Find any affected stock, separate it, mark it 'do not use' and follow the instructions. Then record what you did, even if you held none of the product.

Have a written plan before you need one. It should include contact details for your suppliers, business customers, insurer and local authority. It should say who makes decisions, how you will identify affected batches, how you will separate them, and how you will contact customers. The FSA provides templates, including a contact sheet and a decision log. Practise the plan. Pick a product and see how quickly you can trace where it came from and where it went.

After an incident, the FSA advises a root cause analysis. This finds out how and why the incident happened, and what will stop it happening again. Do not stop at the first answer. 'The label was wrong' is not a root cause. Ask why. Perhaps the recipe changed but nobody updated the label template, because no one was responsible for it. That is the point to fix.

Here is an example. A bakery finds that a batch of PPDS flapjacks was labelled without oats and milk, because the wrong template was used. Some were sold yesterday. The bakery should stop sales, remove the remaining stock, and tell the local authority. It should tell customers who may have bought them, for example with a notice at the point of sale. It should then find the cause and fix it.