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I attended a meeting of more than 500 senior food business executives from 43 countries last week to discuss issues around food safety. Given the complexity of the global food supply, the call for one common food safety standard throughout the supply chain around the world, known as the Global Food Safety Initiative, was of particular interest.

There is clearly a lot of sense in retailers and food suppliers operating to a common standard, not least because of the inefficiencies in the current arrangements whereby retailers and suppliers operate to a multitude of different audit and safety standards around the world.

But what interested me most was the statement that 'Food Safety was a Non-Competitive Issue', which was then re-stated with a question mark at the end. So my challenge to the food industry is this:  Is food safety a competitive issue or not?

My concern is that we need to put in place mechanisms so that we can all learn from the experiences of food safety problems – and this means sharing information and data.  We will continue to explore ways of making this happen with different parts of the food industry.