Product Withdrawal & Recall Poll
This is a private poll and your votes will not be identifiable against your forums username.
A food withdrawal or recall is an action taken by a company to remove potentially unsafe food products from the market. When the need arises for a withdrawal or recall it is vital the process is both quick and effective to minimize risk to the public. Further the follow up investigation into the incident should identify the root cause(s) and implement preventive actions.
Please vote in the poll and if possible comment with further details, so that lessons may be learned.
Thanks,
Simon
Welllllll, I have never had a recall, nor has this company, but when I tried to just vote "No", and not answer any others, it told me I had to fill in an answer for them all. So, Simon, you are only going to get information from people who answered "Yes" to the original question, unless you can figure out how to make "No" equivalent to completing all the others. Usually, these kind of polls don't work that way, so you may need to set up a second poll within the original to get the answers to all the follow up questions.
Martha
Hello Martha, thanks for the feedback. I added an extra option for the other questions "VOTED NO NEVER HAD A RECALL". Now you can vote no and select that in the other sub questions. Bu the way well done on never having a withdrawal or recall. :smile:
Regards,
Simon
Interesting. Would like to see more information the root causes for the types of recalls at some point.
Hi,
New to this forum. According to what I know, our company which manufactures labels and corrugated cartons haven't conducted any recall yet but has already conducted product withdrawal many times due to quality issue, packaging fault, and other labeling issues.
but I am confused to what is the difference between Recall and withdrawal? According to what I know, recall means getting the products from the markets, consumers and the process includes the media while withdrawal means that product has inspected and because it didn't passed the standard, is taken back from the customer and the product hasn't been released to the market. Am I right?
Best regards!
You're product Donie would in all likelyhood never be RECALLED in the food recall sense, as it is not designed for consumption and therefore is not a risk to human health (unless the labelling is a missing allergen issue in which case that would be a recall, not a withdrawl)
product recall removes products from distribution, sale or consumption that present a significant health or safety threat because of a product defect or contamination. This can either be at trade or consumer level. Recalling food products can happen because of a report or complaint from manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, government or consumers. It can also occur after the business itself has run internal tests and audits. A product withdrawal, on the other hand, is where product is removed from the supply chain — but not for health and safety reasons. For example, if something has been labelled with the wrong weight, the manufacturer may want to withdraw it. But if that same product was labelled with the wrong ingredients and allergens, this would then be a recall. Manufacturers sometimes also withdraw products as a precaution, waiting further investigation of a potential public health risk. If that risk is established, the food must be recalled.
I probably screwed up these results a bit. The recalls I was involved in were all at the distribution level at the time, never at a position where I was involved in manufacturing.
It was fun watching the recall process at the distribution level though. We carried out about 10 recalls a year, and they had the process down to a science. I remember being there in the first month or so and hearing the word recall, and I instantly freaked out. They were like "nah, happens all the time." I got out our policy/procedure and watched them through every step of the way. It went pretty flawlessly.
In one of the facilities I worked for we had a USDA recall due to an undeclared allergen (soy lecithin). We made a baked product that then a frozen meat product was inserted into. The USDA part of the process was in a room we deemed the 'USDA room' that was after the bake process and cool down process. In this room is where the frozen meat product was inserted. The inspector actually 'found' the undeclared allergen in the baked product which was under FDA jurisdiction. We were using a pan release spray with soy lecithin. We were alerted of this by the inspector who then alerted their superior. The next morning two additional inspectors showed up. We then were told to sit tight and later were on a call with a team for the USDA telling us their findings and recommending that we do a recall.
Interesting part on this is that the soy lecithin used in the pan spray was made by company that provided us with a letter and results showing that the soy protein was removed thus no concern for anyone with a soy allergen. This had been accepted by the FDA which is why they never got involved but the USDA did not accept this. (Just slightly maddening that the two sides don't always see eye to eye or get along on some rulings).
In the end they deemed our recall excellent and successful on our end. On their end they deemed it not good as half of our product went through a fundraising channel and the USDA was unprepared and never experienced this channel before.
We did a recall based on a test result. It was routine testing. The retention samples were all clear but there was about a half hour period during production that a CCP failed and the operator did not notify anyone (and the records show this fail). Crazy that the test sample was randomly selected from this time period. We used GS1 recall platform and as we had done many mock activities in the previous years, we knew how to use it. One thing we did not properly consider were the logistics of receiving returned product, as we only had one receival area.