Hi Zowie,
As Karen mentioned, FSANZ is very helpful in the event of a food recall and they provide a basic outline of a recall plan. Unfortunately that plan won't give much guidance on how to conduct a risk assessment, developing a strategy or creating an effective communication plan but as you said, you want to get it simple. I am assuming from your description that you are supplying other food manufacturers, not a retail product?
I have a few B2B ingredient suppliers as clients and sounds like from your description that you are not the brand owner for the finished product. Apart from anything you can glean through a physical inspection as it passes through your DC and your transport provider, it lis unlikely that you will be the one to first identify a problem. It will either be your suppliers letting you know or your customers identifying a problem as they use your ingredient in their production, or worse case it gets through the production system and retailer and it is identified by a consumer.
As you are not the brand owner at retail level, it is unlikely that you will be the organisation conducting any consumer level actions. That is generally the retailer and/or final manufacturer/brand owner, although there have been a few instances of ingredient suppliers conducting a consumer level recall. If the final product(s) have not got into the consumer market, you may need to conduct a trade recall (if a safety hazard exists) or withdrawal (quality problem, no safety hazard).
That doesn't lessen your role in the process. If for example you supply to brand owner X who identifies the problem, but you also supply to others, you have a responsibility to all your customers to notify and work with them, have an investigation completed generally by your supplier but you may also need to have local testing done depending on the nature of the problem. Your customers will want to know as much information as possible about the problem so they can conduct their own assessment. For example if the problem is some kind of contaminant, your customers processing may reduce the risk through a filtering process or a cooking process for example. You probably won't have a good understanding of those processes so your role is to get as much information to them as you can as fast as you can so your customer can make that assessment.
In addition, you may need to deal with product returned from your customer depending on the circumstances. It the final product is with retailers, they often just dump it unfortunately. Also the costs associated with the recall may come back to you so your contractual relationships with suppliers are really important and you may need to look at recall insurance to cover costs that you may not be able to get back. Covering the product costs is only part of it. If a recall needs to be conducted, there may be store costs, destruction costs, loss of profit, advertising ....
The other thing to remember is your reputation as a responsible supplier - and therefore your ongoing contracts with your key customers will depend on your approach to an incident when it happens. You need to make sure you have appropriate systems and processes in place. I've had a few calls in the past from B2B suppliers whose business depends on a key contract and that customer has told them to take their product back. When we dig into the incident, the problem almost always gets back to to how the supplier initially managed the incident not the customer being unreasonable!
If you haven't already, I would also recommend registering with GS1 Australia's recall system. It is a fast way to get notifications to all your customers, regulators and retailers quickly.
Let me know if you need any further information. I would be happy to have a chat with you about your business and help you identify what type of recall program you need.
Regards, Steve