Page 25 - Sphere No.16 (Apr 2006)

the Mainland. A new government department, the Food Safety,
Inspection and Quarantine Department, will run the Centre
for Food Safety and will also be responsible for strengthening
links with food safety regulatory
authorities in the Mainland. “We
need to expand our surveillance
mechanism, not just to local food,
but also to other overseas suppli-
ers, including the Chinese main-
land,” Dr Chow said.
In a small laboratory in Sheung
Shui near the border with China,
Peter Johnston, PARKnSHOP’s
General Manager, Quality, Food
Safety & Regulatory Affairs, wel-
comed the latest government pro-
nouncements. It was way back in
1997 that he set up the company’s
quality assurance department
after PARKnSHOP had introduced superstores that brought
together the concept of the wet market and the traditional
supermarket.
“We were pioneers. The fresh food supply chain has its short-
comings,” he said. “We quickly found that tapping into the wet
markets’ fresh food supply chain caused us problems. This was
compounded by being a big brand name like PARKnSHOP.
Customers expect much more. Back then, these shortcomings
caused food safety incidents although we weren’t doing any-
thing different from anyone else, but because it was a big super-
market the story got a lot of media coverage. There are so many
food safety issues locally. For example, in Europe, the problems
with pesticides I’d come across
were the kind raised by green
groups. You’d have to eat 100 cab-
bages a day for 15 years to have
a problem. In Hong Kong, some-
times one mouthful can kill. It’s a
completely different ball game.
“So we decided we had to com-
pletely change the way we bought
high-risk vegetables from Main-
land China. The concept of simply
going to the wholesale market and
buying baskets of different vegeta-
bles and selling them in the stores
could not provide us with the food
safety assurance we were looking
for. We set up a whole new supply chain infrastructure. We now
have complete traceability. We know which farm a basket of veg-
etables comes from, what date the seedwas planted, when fertiliser
was added. We know the complete life history of the vegetable. I’m
a great believer in you can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
It is a similar story with pork. In Hong Kong, all imported
pigs are sold live at the government central auction before be-
ing sent to the slaughterhouse. They are then delivered to the
wet markets whole where they are cut up. “Let’s just say that
SPHERE 23
From China’s farms to the fresh food section of
your PARKnSHOP, Peter Johnston’s team makes
sure the produce is of the best quality.