When Jeremy Travis chairs a meeting of the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy’s food safety committee, he is not surprised by the collaboration in the room. Travis, vice president of quality and technical services at Hilmar Cheese Co., has recently taken the reins of the 16-member food safety committee that develops and shares best practices to continuously improve and advance dairy processing and manufacturing procedures.
“It’s a privilege to bring together experts from across the industry in a precompetitive forum,” he says. “The research and work that the committee engages in would be difficult, if not impossible, for us to do as individual companies.”
The Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy was created 10 years ago by Dairy Management Inc. (DMI), an organization that is funded by 40,000 U.S. dairy farmers and importers through the dairy checkoff. Dairy farmers pay 15 cents and dairy importers pay 7.5 cents for every hundred pounds of milk they sell or import into a generic dairy product promotion fund—the dairy checkoff—that DMI manages along with state and regional promotion groups. That money—with U.S. Department of Agriculture oversight—is used to fund programs aimed at promoting dairy consumption and protecting the good image of dairy farmers, dairy products, and the dairy industry.
Dairy farmer leadership of the checkoff saw an opportunity through the Innovation Center to unite the entire value chain around common goals and challenges, such as food safety, in a precompetitive setting.
Tim Stubbs, vice president of product research and food safety for DMI, manages the day-to-day priorities of the committee and its long-term goals. He sees the “convening power” of the Innovation Center up close.
“We have the top leaders and subject matter experts from across the dairy industry working together to solve problems and share solutions,” Stubbs says. “It’s like working with an all-star team.”
Commitment to Food Safety
Sharpening dairy’s food safety focus is not a new priority. In fact, the industry is built on decades of sharing through organizations such as the National Conference on Interstate Milk Shipments, 3-A Sanitary Standards Inc., and the International Association for Food Protection.
But the dairy industry also has seen the negative impact food safety issues have had on other categories, such as one of the worst in U.S. history involving the Peanut Corporation of America in 2008.
Dairy industry leaders, including Larry Jensen, who was president of Leprino Foods Company and chair of the Innovation Center at the time, and Mike Haddad, CEO and president of Schreiber Foods Inc. and current Innovation Center chair, wanted to make sure dairy heightened its food safety commitment as a result.
Committee member Edith Wilkin, vice president of food safety for Leprino, recalls Jensen saying the dairy industry needed to set aside its competitive interests and tackle food safety as a collective category. Jensen and Haddad felt strongly that food safety should never be used by a company as a competitive advantage and that a significant crisis could hurt everyone in the dairy category.
Together, they encouraged the Innovation Center to make food safety one of its unifying priorities.
“Larry was concerned that perhaps not as much attention or education was happening across the industry,” Wilkin says. “He began to talk with some of the CEOs who were part of the Innovation Center’s efforts, and they came away with the sense that we need to do something more intentioned in terms of training, education, best practices, and more outreach.”
Soon, that vision became a reality, and about a dozen leaders from different businesses left their competitive mindsets outside the doors of a Wisconsin hotel meeting room and huddled for the first time as a single industry. Wilkin remembers Tom Hedge, a former executive with Schreiber Foods, leading that first committee meeting and asking the room, “So, what kinds of problems are you seeing?”
His question was met with somewhat of a memorable thud.
“When you begin to talk about ‘here’s what I do sanitation-wise,’ those get very close to the vest and typically that’s not the type of information that is shared, even among friends,” she says. “It was awkward and difficult. However, the people we brought together were all in the quality food safety arena. Gradually, there was an opening up, which really helped.”
A Spirit of Collaboration
The Innovation Center is proving that a large, complex industry is stronger when it works with a collective spirit on important issues such as food safety. Led by CEOs and chairs of dairy cooperatives, processors, retailers, and associations, the Innovation Center provides a precompetitive forum for the dairy community to develop credible, industry-aligned tools and resources to advance U.S. Dairy’s long-standing commitment to social responsibility and continuous improvement (see “Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy Food Safety Resources”).
More than 60 percent of U.S. milk production is represented by Innovation Center board members, including many of dairy’s biggest companies, such as Hilmar, Schreiber, Leprino, HP Hood, Land O’Lakes, Foremost Farms, Agri-Mark, Dean Foods, and Dairy Farmers of America.
Keeping cheese, fluid milk, dry ingredients, yogurt, and ice cream safe from pathogens has their full commitment. As a result, Wilkin says, the buy-in of that original food safety vision of “working as one” is today fully embraced.
“Some of the newer people who participate in the Innovation Center are somewhat shocked at how frank our conversations are,” she says. “We have a (dairy company) president who came from the soft drink industry and he said, ‘We didn’t talk to each other. I’m surprised at what dairy does through the Innovation Center.’
“It always amazes him. It amazes a lot of people.”
The committee follows several action platforms, including:
• Pathogen control guidance documents (comprehensive Listeria guide issued; broader pathogen guide under development)
• Listeria research consortium
• Traceability
These committee members—Stubbs’s “all-stars”—are some of the dairy industry’s leading experts who focus on food safety for their respective organizations.
“These are people at the top of their field and they work for private companies,” Stubbs says. “The companies are fully committed to this effort and have given the committee access, for example, to the best pathogen experts in the world. Companies happily share the best sanitation experts, microbiologists, people with 30 years’ experience in equipment design, and other ‘internal’ experts for the greater good.”
The committee meets in-person twice a year and convenes for monthly calls. Stubbs says they share best practices, discuss workshops, and Listeria research. At the end of the call, they save time for open dialogue. This openness builds trust, and the sharing of best practices and insights, plus having access to an arsenal of experts with skill sets for any need, is what keeps the momentum going strong.
“As a company, we get to contribute, and when you give, you get to receive,” Travis says. “I used to be surprised by the collaboration, but you soon realize that we all live through a lot of the same things, and it’s easier to move faster when you understand them together. The research work we’re doing as a consortium would be a lot more expensive and complicated for us to do as individual companies.
“So, it’s really easy to align the Innovation Center work with my day job. I have a lot of regular interaction with the committee members and it keeps Hilmar from having to reinvent the wheel.”
Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy Food Safety Resources
To strengthen manufacturing practices in all dairy processing facilities, advance science-based tools, and diminish food safety risks that could compromise the reputation of the U.S. dairy industry, the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy provides workshops, tools, and guidance documents.
• Listeria Guidance for the U.S. Dairy Industry – Comprehensive guidance for manufacturers of all sizes, free online in English and Spanish: www.usdairy.com/foodsafety
• Spanish-Language Tools – Listeria guidance document, checklists, and Sanitation Standard Operating Procedures, examples available in Spanish