This is a speech I gave in Dublin on 5 November 1999 to the Arthur Cox Food Law Conference:

I have one central point to make here this afternoon, and let me give it to you upfront. It is this: at the end of the day, it is the customers who will call the shots on food safety.

The customers and nobody else. Other players: the food manufacturers, the retailers, the health authorities, the legislators, the government and EU agencies — all these have an input to make. But when all is said and done, someone must decide. And that someone is the customer.

Many people don’t like this fact. They find it uncomfortable, and so they refuse to face up to the very serious implications that flow from it. They see the customer as merely the end of the

I can give you a good example of this.

I was in the United States recently, talking to people about the current dispute between the EU and the US regarding hormone-implanted beef. The people I was talking to saw this purely as a trade issue, one to be settled by tough negotiations between the US and the EU. They saw Europe’s refusal to take US beef as merely a negotiating pawn, and one which would eventually be negotiated out of the way. After that, US beef would start appearing on supermarket shelves and European customers would start buying it.

I found it extremely hard to get it over to them that the people they had to convince were not the European Commission, nor the individual Governments in Europe, but the people of Europe.

I pointed out that they could possibly break down the physical barriers to entry through negotiation, but that didn’t mean they could sell their beef. As retailers, we will not stock what people won’t buy — we’d very quickly go out of business if we did. Our customers simply won’t buy anything that they, for whatever reason, don’t like. And all the indications we have suggest that European customers don’t want hormone-implanted beef, no matter where it comes from. End of story.

In telling you this I am not getting at Americans in particular. I am getting at everybody who hasn’t faced up to the new truth about food safety: that it’s the customers who are calling the shots, and who will do so increasingly in the years ahead.

Food law, food regulations, are there to support the customer’s decisions — not to make the decisions for them.

Let me offer another analogy, this time a legal one.

The situation on food safety is rather like a court of law in which the crunch decision on the case will be made by a jury. A court case takes place within a well-defined legal framework, and according to very precise rules. Experts, legal and otherwise, put forward arguments on one side or the other. A super-expert, wearing a moth-eaten wig, presides grumpily over the whole performance.

But neither the experts nor the super-expert make the most important decision on the case. That decision rests with 12 men and women who listen to everything and then go into the jury room and make up their own minds. It is the jury who have the yea or nay, and if they so decide they can come to a verdict that is different to the one the legal experts might have come to. They can be as perverse as they like. They can even use common-sense to over-ride legal niceties. In the jury-room, the jury rules absolutely.

This, it seems to me, is like the situation we have with food safety. It is the customers who retire to the jury room and deliver their verdict. No-one can interfere with that verdict when it is being made. But unlike a jury verdict, the customers’ decision cannot be over-turned on appeal. It is binding and final — unless, of course, the customers change their mind!

In approaching the issues of food safety and food regulation at the governmental level, or at the EU level, or at the level of world trade negotiations, we need to understand as best we can what exactly is going on. So let us probe a little deeper, and discover how this situation came about.

Because it was not always like this. I’m not saying customers have not always had a concern for food safety. They were indeed always concerned. But until recently, this was a concern they felt they didn’t have to worry about. They assumed that issues of safety were being properly looked after, by others on their behalf. Until quite recently, food safety was not something that most customers would have thought about at all, as part of their decision-making process when they went to do their weekly shop.

What had been building up over the years was an increasing interest from customers in what I could call the “health” aspect of food. Over the past 20 or 25 years, there has been an enormous increase in customer interest in nutrition. This has spawned a demand for full information about food ingredients, and underpins the requirements for proper labelling of ingredients and additives.

But this trend, as I say, has been focused more on health than on safety. People were becoming more and more interested in eating what was good for them and their family, but they did not see this interest as a life-or-death issue in the short term.

I had a ring-side seat as this trend developed, because every week I sit down with a group of volunteer customers and listen to them talk about whatever is on their minds in the whole area of grocery shopping. I’m in a much better position than a judge, actually, because I have a seat inside the jury-room!

As I listened to customers over the years talking about the health and nutritional aspects of food, I was struck by one central fact. Their biggest thirst was for information. When people have to make a decision, they reach for information on which to base that decision. So they want informative labelling, for starters. But they also want the background information that allows them to make an informed judgement when they read the labelling.

There was one particular kind of information I discovered they wanted. It’s what you could call “provenance” information. On the one hand, they wanted to know what was in a food product, and what contents were good and what contents were problematical. That was the “content” information. But side by side with that, they also wanted to know where the product had come from. They wanted to know its provenance.

In terms of vegetables, for instance, we discovered they were interested in knowing precisely who had actually grown those vegetables – down to the farmer’s name and address. With meat, they were interested in knowing what farm the beast had come from. When they had a person to relate to, in connection with a food product, they felt more comfortable about the quality of the product. Names had a reassuring effect.

Maybe this interest in putting a person’s name on a farm product was the equivalent of trusting a product brand. The theory of branding is that people feel comfortable with who they know, not least because they know how to trace them if they have a problem or complaint. I discovered, from listening to customers, that there was a similar thirst for putting a name on to agricultural products — but that branding was not the answer.

It was actually out of this customer desire, to put a name on to a formerly anonymous product, that led my company into the traceability business in the early 90s. We did it with vegetables, putting not only the name of the grower but also his or her photograph over the shelf that carried the produce. We did it with meat, putting in a traceability system that allowed us to follow every piece of beef right back up through the chain to the farm-yard gate.

In doing this we were driven by considerations of quality and taste, not of food safety per se. With beef, for instance, apart from fulfilling the customer’s need to put a name with the goods, we wanted to get over to our customers that we knew about and controlled every stage of the meat production process, and applied strict quality procedures at every point to ensure that what they bought was both wholesome and tasty.

However, as it turned out, this approach had enormous value in quite a different direction.

When the BSE crisis hit Britain, the immediate and virtually universal customer reaction right across Europe was to stop eating beef. This was not because they thought all beef was a problem, but because they were not particularly aware of where the beef they were eating came from.

Within days, the provenance of beef became a big issue. In France, for instance, they not only closed their doors to British beef but also, effectively, to beef from anywhere else but France. When I would point out to my French colleagues that Irish beef was not affected, they said “Yes, we know that, but it’s too complicated for our customers. They’ve decided they don’t want anything except French beef, they can be sure about that and that’s where they are drawing the line.”

This was the customers talking, not the governments. And while the customers believed and acted that way, there was nothing any government could do about it.

Meanwhile, back in Ireland, what was happening? Here, as all across Europe, people started switching away from beef to other meat products. But what was extremely interesting was this. We were the only supermarket chain to have a traceability system in place, and already understood and accepted by our customers.

Reflecting that, our customers showed a different behaviour pattern to Irish customers in general. More of them went on buying beef throughout the crisis. And, after the initial flurry was over, those of our customers who had stopped beef-buying were quicker to come back than those of other shops.

A year later, our customers were buying more beef than they had been before the crisis hit. Again, that was ahead of customer behaviour in Ireland generally.

What can we learn from all this? I believe several things, but for the moment let me focus on just two.

First — and really this is just recapping — what we had until about five years ago was a very strong customer assumption that food safety was being looked after for them. They trusted food producers, they trusted retailers, they trusted governments and government agencies to see that the food they ate would not kill them.

Even as they became more interested in the long-term health dimension of food, they never really questioned that the food they bought and ate was perfectly safe.

There was an atmosphere of total trust.

Second — and this is where we move into new territory — that atmosphere of total trust is now gone.

Where before trust was almost absolute, now we have a lack of trust that is equally absolute. This is the most important central fact that we have to face in restoring public confidence in food.

May I say that, just as I have experienced a great reluctance to admit that the customers are now calling the shots, I have experienced a corresponding reluctance to accept that there has been a permanent shift in attitude by customers.

During the BSE crisis, I encountered again and again the belief that this was a temporary set-back. Many people in the business saw it as just another food-scare, like the many small-scale and localised food-scares that had happened in the past. Those scares had not fundamentally shaken the public’s confidence in food, and BSE wouldn’t either.

The people who felt this way were wrong, and I am sorry to say that there are many people who still feel this way. There are still people who feel you can restore public confidence in food by throwing a big cheque-book at an advertising agency, so that people can be bombarded with happy slogans.

They are wrong.

The truth of the matter is that, all across Europe, the BSE crisis was a watershed. Virtually overnight, people removed the absolute trust that they formerly had in food, and replaced it with a vary watchfulness.

That is the reality that everyone concerned with food must face today, whether they are involved with the production of food, the selling of food, or the regulation of food. We are no longer selling into a situation of trust, but one of distrust.

Today’s customer is saying, in effect: “Convince me”.

And if I can, on behalf of customers, expand that terse demand a little, what they were really saying was: convince me with facts.

— Convince me with information.

— Don’t try to convince me with propaganda campaigns, or the vague promises of politicians.

— Give me the facts and I will judge for myself.

The response to this thirst for information has been, up to now, a little disappointing. The response has not, I think, been in scale to the seriousness of the problem. Part of the reason for that is that many people in the food business are still in denial as to the real nature of the problem.

In Ireland, we haven’t done so badly at one level.

We set up the Food Safety Authority, just barely avoiding what would have been a fatal mistake — putting it under the Department of Agriculture. Under the aegis of Department of Health and Children, and thanks to the dynamic leadership of Dr Pat Wall as chief executive, the Food Safety Authority is beginning to fulfil an absolutely vital role.

We can all be proud of it, but instead of slapping ourselves on the back we should concentrate our energy on ensuring that the Authority remains totally and utterly independent — both of the vested interests of producers, and of political forces that might be responsive to those interests. Trust, again, is the issue. If people ever lose trust in the Authority, it will be dead in the water overnight.

But apart from the setting up of the Food Safety Authority, not much has been done to restore public confidence in food — either nationally or at European level. And in the meantime, much has happened to further undermine it.

BSE came and more or less went, but it proved not to be just a once-off crisis. We have had all too many food scares since — luckily, none of them on the same scale as BSE but all of them quite big enough to put the tender flower of public confidence right back into the seedbox.

If I can focus on just one aspect of what happened this year. Talking to customers, what shocked them most about the Belgian crisis was the cover-up associated with it. They found totally unacceptable that the problem should have been known to exist, even at Government level in Belgium, but was covered up until the point where it could be covered up no longer.

This established beyond any doubt at all that food crises are much too important to be left to the exclusive jurisdiction of any national government.

Cover-ups are nothing new, of course. There had been instances in the BSE crisis of scientific information about the dangers being suppressed in the official machine. It seems that, whenever and wherever a food crisis occurs, there is a universal tendency to play it down.

The result is that when it does see the light of day — as it inevitably will — public reaction to any attempted cover-up is quite fierce. Common-sense would seem to dictate that these problems should be shared with the public at the earliest possible moment and to the fullest possible extent.

Perhaps we need a legal mechanism to ensure that this always happens.

Any argument that the public will panic is both untrue and patronising: the record shows that the public, in general, have behaved more responsibly during food safety crises than some of the people who would aspire to make their judgements for them.

It is, of course, good that the European Commission has now “got religion” as far as food safety is concerned. Indeed, it could hardly do anything else, given that public unease about the food crises earlier this year was a significant contributing factor to the collapse of the Santer Commission.

And it is, of course, immensely gratifying for us in Ireland that our new Commissioner has been entrusted with this immense task. I am sure that we all wish him well with it. Some might describe it as a poisoned chalice, but either way the challenge is nothing short of enormous.

For the European Commission, the challenge takes two forms in particular.

The first is that the key task, as I have stressed again and again this afternoon, is restoring public trust in food. The Commission’s difficulty there is that it has a history of being somewhat remote from the people of Europe. Europe’s citizens do not regard the Commission President as a wise old uncle; most of them would be hard put even to tell you his name.

So inevitably the Commission will have an uphill struggle in convincing the people of Europe that they should believe what it says and effectively to entrust their lives to it. I do not doubt the sincerity of those who now want to change how the citizens of Europe view the Commission — I merely want to stress how big the task will be.

The other challenge for the EU is whether it can demonstrate a convincing ability to stand up to national governments. Yes, they ganged up on Britain during the BSE crisis — but Britain has always been the Member State that everyone loves to hate. Yes, somewhat tardily, they rapped Belgium’s little knuckles earlier this year — but given that it was all happening virtually on the Commission’s doorstep, some people would question the ability of the EU ever to react quickly enough and strongly enough.

But the real test will come in dealing with a food crisis problem presented by one of Europe’s heavyweights — such as the French, the Germans or the Italians. To be absolutely frank, the way the current issue of the dubious animal feed in France is being handled lacks some of the decisiveness and the persuasive force that problems like this demand.

We will see.

Clearly, we have major issues on food safety to address at national level and at EU level. But there are also issues at a wider level than that, as I suggested earlier when mentioning the dispute with the US over hormone-implanted beef.

A similar but even more far-ranging issue is the controversy over genetically-modified foods. This is shaping up to be a bone of contention not just between the US and the EU, but between the US and most of the rest of the world. It is an issue that will certainly bedevil the new round of world trade talks starting at the end of this month in Seattle.

I recently ran into the chief executive of Monsanto at an international conference, and you know I had to feel sorry for him. In that company they clearly find it very hard to understand that European feelings about genetically-modified foods are not just a protectionist ploy thought up by Europe’s trade negotiators, but are instead very sincerely held misgivings by a very large number of ordinary citizens all across Europe.

They also tend towards the view that if something is good enough for the American Food and Drugs Administration, it should be good enough for the rest of the world without further question.

The genetically-modified foods issue is shaping up as a major international trade dispute, and I think this is extremely unfortunate. That is definitely not the forum where the issue should be decided, and in fact any attempt to decide it there is doomed to fail.

This is an issue which we in Ireland have to face up to at national level, and we have not done so yet in any satisfactory way. We cannot simply leave it up to Europe to decide for us, because we have particular national interests that we need to address in arriving at a policy.

The fact is that for Ireland genetically-modified foods could be either an opportunity or a threat, depending on how things turn out.

If genetic modification proves itself as a safe way to develop improved food products, then it is a major opportunity for Ireland as a food-producing country. If GM foods are the way of the future, then this is a wave that we should want to ride — not one we have to watch helplessly from the shore, as other countries profit from its benefits.

In approaching this we should remind ourselves that in the long-term Ireland is not an agricultural country, it is a food-producing country. We should therefore have an open, enterprising and innovative attitude to technological breakthroughs in the production of food.

However, genetic modification may not turn out that way at all. It could be that the technique has unacceptable risks, both in environmental terms and in terms of food safety. GM foods could be the thalidomide of the new millennium. It could be that this is a technological development, like the production of electric power from nuclear reactors, where mankind would be wisest to say “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Our dilemma here in Ireland, as a nation critically concerned with the future of food, is to decide which way to jump.

If we want to take the opportunity, we cannot wait until all the answers are in. If we do that, we will be at the end of the queue and our small size will tell against us in attempting to carve out a place in the new market-place.

On the other hand, if we decide to jump in and GM foods prove to be a non-starter, our association with it would definitely rub off to the detriment of our existing food industry.

This is a decision we are going to have to take, and take soon. In making it we cannot expect to have all the information we need, but we should insist to ourselves that we base our decision and our future policy on reason and scientific fact rather than on emotion and rumour. And we should let the people decide, not take it for them.

This is why I have, again and again, appealed for a cool, informed national debate on the subject.

It has not been helped by the arrogance of producers like Monsanto who put people’s backs up with their bullying.

It has not been helped by the somewhat hysterical outpourings of some, though not all, of the opponents of GM foods.

It has not been helped by the fact that many of the scientists with knowledge in this area are working for vested interests, and many of the independent ones are not very articulate at expressing their point of view.

Neither has it been helped by the Government’s rather ham-handed attempt at a limited consultation process, whose findings have —not surprisingly — not found general acceptance.

As I say, this is a food regulation issue on which Ireland must make up its mind before very long. And as I said in the beginning, whether we like it or not it is the public who will decide — not the experts of any hue, and not the Government.

In food safety, as in so many other aspect of life today, the customer is king.