Moy Park outlines top poultry priorities
The horsemeat scandal might not have directly affected the poultry industry, but that didn’t mean Moy Park’s technical director for Europe, Ursula Lavery, sat back and watched the fallout with her feet up. Far from it.
For her, it was an ideal opportunity to revisit the traceability procedures and practices the firm has in place and give them a thorough going over, while also urging her teams to “think like criminals”. Speaking at the firm’s Craigavon HQ in Northern Ireland, Lavery, who was recently appointed to the business’s executive board, says: “I asked my team to put themselves into the shoes of the criminals and look at what could be targeted if they were trying to make money.”
It’s something that is easier said than done. After all, there’s not a training course that can teach you how to think like a master food fraudster. “It was a huge shift and it was very difficult, but my team is very good at scanning what is happening globally,” she adds. “They looked at spices, fruits and dried powder and extrapolated from that what could happen to the meat industry further down the line.”
Every step of the process (Return to top)
“We looked at every step of the process, right from storage and up through the supply chain.”
With a vast remit that includes legal compliance, supply chain management, laboratory management and category technical management for one of Europe’s largest poultry processors, it is no surprise that traceability is one of Lavery’s hot topics.
But this focus is not purely driven out of concerns over food fraud, she insists.
She speaks highly of the business’s Agri-Web traceability system, which she also views as a tool for sharing data with Moy Park’s 800 UK and Irish farmers and as a potential source of enhanced customer communications.
“If we go to one of our slaughter sites and look at a specific flock, our system will tell us which parents delivered the chicks that created the broilers,” she says.
“We can then go back another level to identify the grandparents and identify every feed batch that has gone in. That really is excellent work.”
Consumer concerns (Return to top)
From a consumer level, the company is currently debating how much of this information shoppers would like to receive.
On a basic level, she believes the consumer wants to know that the chicken they are buying has had a good life, that all welfare standards have been met and, when it comes to whole bird purchases, where it came from.
“The next level is would they want to know who [the bird’s] parents and grandparents are? That is something we are debating at the moment. With the right technology somebody could be able to scan a code and access all this information via an app.”
Interestingly, the firm’s research shows consumers are less concerned with provenance in more heavily processed products.
“Typically, when you are selling a primal cut, the consumer is primarily concerned with where it came from, while for a more heavily processed product it is a little bit lower down the consumer decision tree,” Lavery adds.
Priorities (Return to top)
In addition to the focus on traceability, Lavery – who joined the firm 25 years ago in a sales and marketing role – says she used her “first 100 days” in her present role to set the tone in terms of her priorities, which she terms: “quality, research and technical agriculture”.
With regard to quality, she is bolstering her team with two new appointments: a director of food safety and compliance and a group technical and quality manager.
“Quality underpins our business and reputation in the marketplace,” she says.
While the food safety aspect of her role is paramount and her focus in this area “goes without saying”, Lavery also plays a key strategic role when it comes to research and innovation from a technical perspective.
“Research can take a number of guises, so it can be around processes, technology, products and the more blue sky research that has the ability to come through in three to five years’ time in terms of flavour enhancement, consumer benefits and the next big product.
“I take food safety for granted, that is what I do, but, on top of that, the area of research and innovation from a technical perspective is something I am very heavily involved in,” she adds.
The final of the three key priorities has been around "technical agriculture”, where she is attempting to transfer the analytical technical approaches adopted in factories and adapt them to an agricultural setting.
“This is about research and training and taking the knowledge from the local farmers and developing it to the next level. We want to get more information from these guys because they are the experts,” she says.
“We have to tap into that, while also offering them training about the big issues that will be affecting them in the years to come. We have lots of data on their flocks, which they provide, but we need to look at how we share things like this with them in a really user-friendly way.”
Cracking Campylobacter (Return to top)
While Lavery clearly has responsibility for a considerable swathe of Moy Park's European operations, she is also seen as an authority on wider issues affecting the poultry industry – not least the efforts to tackle the rates of campylobacter infection.
Campylobacter is the most common cause of food poisoning in the UK. It accounts for a third of the cost of the burden of foodborne illness in England and Wales, estimated at more than £583M in 2008. And, as Lavery, a member of the Food Standards Agency’s Joint Working Group on Campylobacter concedes, it is proving to be a difficult problem to crack.
“We still don’t know how campylobacter operates. It is not salmonella. We have all the on-farm biosecurity measures in place for salmonella and we now have one of the lowest rates in Europe. However, the same biosecurity standards don’t have the same effect on campylobacter so there is still a lot of work going on in this regard,” she says.
In fact, Moy Park itself is currently nearing the end of a two-year “model farm” programme that will enable experts to assess what role further biosecurity measures could play in reducing levels of infection.
Lavery adds: “The idea of the model farm is to enhance the biosecurity measures, so the house, not the farm as a whole, has become the secure unit. We now have the information coming through, which will be statistically analysed to see what extra benefits can be gained from these biosecurity measures.”
Agricultural practices are not the be-all-and-end-all for Lavery. But, she says, there are plenty of research opportunities in the factory setting, especially around carcass washing.
While anti-microbial washes remain illegal in the UK, Moy Park recently ran tests using chlorine dioxide and electrolysed water, but they had no discernible impact on campylobacter.
That’s not to say, however, that they may not have a role to play in conjunction with other measures, Lavery adds.
“Because we know that chlorine might help us in a hurdle effect, along with something else, we have retained chlorine dioxide across all our sites. On its own, it may not have a significant impact, but if we link it with other things, it might give us a better reduction going forward,” she adds.
You sense that the challenge of combatting campylobacter is one that Lavery relishes, not least because it provides the opportunity to test new theories and take a hands-on approach, especially in the factory.
“Exactly,” she says. “I am still very much a hands-on technical director. I enjoy factories. I enjoy being in them, seeing what we are doing and understanding the risks we face and finding the solutions to them. If you ask anyone around here: “What does Ursula like?”, they’ll tell you straightaway that it is factories!”
