Writing

Practical writing for quality and technical teams in food and drink: recalls, withdrawals, complaints, mock recalls, and what actually happens in the first hour of an incident.

• What consumers actually do when a recall happens

  Most recall planning is written from the business’s point of view, what we say, when we say it, who signs it off. Consumers experience it from the other side entirely: a headline, a product in their cupboard, and a fast decision about whether to trust this brand again. What th...

  21 September 2026 · 2 min

• When the problem isn’t yours, but it’s still your problem

  Some of the biggest risks to a food and drink business do not start inside it. A regulatory change lands with six months’ notice and a hard deadline. An ingredient shortage two suppliers upstream pushes your costs up overnight. A competitor’s recall makes every customer in you...

  14 September 2026 · 1 min

• Choosing the right integrations: Why more tools isn’t the same as more value

  It is easy to end up with a dozen tools and full value from none of them. Every one gets adopted for a good reason, and every one ends up half-used, because nobody has the time to actually live inside all of them at once. The fix is not fewer tools, it is one that tells you w...

  7 September 2026 · 2 min

• Behind every batch number is a person

  A batch number is the least emotional object in food safety, a code on a label, a row in a spreadsheet, a field in a traceability system. It’s easy to spend a whole career getting faster and more accurate at handling them without pausing on what they actually represent. Behind...

  31 August 2026 · 2 min

• What Retailers, the FSA and the FDA expect during a food recall

  During a food recall, two audiences are always watching how you respond: your retailers, and your regulator. In the UK, that’s the Food Standards Agency. In the US, it’s the FDA, or USDA for meat, poultry and eggs. The specifics differ, but both are ultimately judging the same...

  24 August 2026 · 3 min

• Recall vs Withdrawal vs Market Action: Which one are you in?

  A withdrawal removes a product from the supply chain before it reaches the consumer, or where it poses no safety risk to the consumer. A recall goes further and asks consumers to return or dispose of a product they may already have, because it poses a risk to health. Market ac...

  17 August 2026 · 3 min

• Your recall plan Is a PDF nobody has opened

  Most food brands have a recall plan, well-written, signed off, sitting in a shared drive nobody has opened since. When a real incident starts, people don’t open the PDF, they open a group chat. That gap, between the plan you have and the response you actually run, is where rec...

  10 August 2026 · 2 min

• Is your business actually ready for a business problem?

  Most food and drink businesses plan for the incident everyone expects, a contamination, a recall, a labelling error. Fewer plan for the problem that starts somewhere else entirely, a key supplier collapsing overnight, a critical piece of equipment failing at the worst possibl...

  3 August 2026 · 2 min

• How to run a mock recall (and why traceability alone isn’t preparedness)

  A mock recall, or as we like to call them a Response Rehearsal tests your ability to identify, locate and account for an affected product as if a real recall were underway. Pick a batch, trace it forward and back within a set time, and reconcile the quantities. But if that’s a...

  27 July 2026 · 2 min

• Foreign body in your product causes harm: What to do in the first hour

  When a consumer reports a foreign body, do three things in the first hour: establish whether anyone’s been hurt and whether they still have the object and the product, score the risk based on the object and the product type, and start retrieving the physical evidence properly....

  20 July 2026 · 2 min

• How to classify a food safety incident - A severity framework

  Classify a food safety incident by working out how serious it is across five risk dimensions, then setting one of four response levels. The five dimensions are consumer safety, operational, reputational, regulatory and financial risk. The four levels are Awareness, Manage, Mob...

  13 July 2026 · 4 min

• The first 60 minutes of a food or drink recall - step-by-step

  In the first hour of a food recall, you do four things in order: notify the response team, assess what you’re actually dealing with, decide on immediate containment, and communicate. Do them fast, with the facts you have rather than the full picture you wish you had, and log e...

  6 July 2026 · 2 min

• Spreadsheets, WhatsApp and email, the hidden cost of coordinating a recall by hand

  Roughly half of food and drink suppliers still coordinate incidents with a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group and a chain of emails. It works fine in steady state, which is exactly why it survives. Then a real recall hits, and the cracks that were invisible on a normal Tuesday beco...

  29 June 2026 · 2 min