Friday, March 29

In full food alert for Mercadona, Aldi and Lidl ice creams, the question is how we locate the thousands of products that are in the country’s refrigerators


The Spanish Agency for Food Safety and Nutrition (AESAN) has published this week a food alert related to several white brands of ice cream that are sold in Mercadona, Lidl and Aldi. The three companies are already notifying their customers of the problem and are working on the withdrawal of the affected products.


There are many food alerts throughout the year. 357 in the year 2020, for example. But, especially in summer when the daily news is scarce, it is relatively common to find ourselves in the press (or on the networks) with calls for certain products to be returned. But beyond the problem in question (the pieces of stick that have been found in some references), there is something interesting: we are not talking about an ice cream in a specific store; We are talking about thousands of ice creams in more than 2,500 stores distributed throughout the national territory.

In other words, talk about a system designed to detect, notify and correct “direct or indirect risks to human health derived from food products”. In other words, we are talking about SCIRI.

Food alert in Mercadona, Lidl and Aldi ice creams due to the presence of foreign bodies

Protect ourselves from risks in an increasingly complex world. Many years ago consumption ceased to be an eminently local issue. On the contrary, the ‘common market’ (the movement of goods, services and people across the continent) is one of the central points of the European Union. The problem is that this is a monumental mess. At a European level, consumer, industrial and health competencies are distributed in the most diverse ways, which is why we need a way to coordinate them.

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In fact, in Spain alone, in addition to the AESAN (Spanish Agency for Food Health and Nutrition) and the regional bodies, there are almost twenty institutions, associations or corporations with ‘competencies’ in the world of health alerts. And that, as the world becomes more complex, can become a problem.

SCIRI and the warning network. That is precisely what the Coordinated Information Exchange System (SCIRI) tries to solve, guaranteeing that all the information reaches where it has to. In view of the data, it seems that we are succeeding. A few years ago, Moya and Ferrer (from the toxicology area of ​​the University of Valencia) decided to put figures on this improvement and carried out a study on the evolution of food alerts from the Coordinated System for Rapid Information Exchange. Their data allowed us to be optimistic: despite the increase in risks arising from the free movement of products throughout the European Union, alerts decreased at a rate of almost 5% per year.

The problems, however, are still there. However, as we have seen in recent years, the risk is still there. Cases of poor handling practices (lack of hygiene, training problems, etc…), limitations in control systems (poor assessment of risks and hazards of industrial processes), contamination (due to lack of ‘food defense’) and fraud continue to generate numerous food problems.

The listeriosis crisis and the

What happens if there is a health alert? The SCIRI works with three levels of urgency or reliability: alerts (alert notifications those in which rapid action is required or may be required by the corresponding competent authorities), information (those notifications that do not require rapid action ), news (when the possible alert has not been confirmed by official sources).

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In the case of the alert, the most dangerous, the product is traced following the records and batch numbers. From then on, the appropriate actions are launched, be it immobilization (if it is in the distribution chain), withdrawal (for products that are in the stores, but have not been marketed), recovery (if they are already in the hands of consumers). This last one, surely, is the most complex part.

The same North American FDA recognized in 2019 that this was one of the great problems that it had pending. And it is that in the US around 48 million people (1 in 6 Americans) fall ill with preventable food poisoning each year. 128,000 end up being hospitalized and some 3,000 end up dying. Comparatively, in Europe the situation is substantially better, but more than 500 people die on the continent from preventable poisoning.

Greatest hits, yes; but many pending tasks. We have made progress, of course. Things like the installation of QR codes on the packaging to check the status of each product at all times with a mobile phone make the information accessible, but the truth is that the effort made by the authorities to reduce the risks on this side is not as effective as we would like. And, being an agri-food power, it would not hurt for us to lead that change.

Image | WTP

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