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.
Nobody writes down why they decided not to recall
Most food businesses document recalls well and non-recalls badly. When you decide a deviation is contained, a complaint is isolated or a batch is safe to release, that decision is usually made in a call, agreed in a chat thread and never written up, because nothing happened. T...
26 October 2026 · 3 min
Your product is made on someone else's site. Who runs the recall?
Short answer - In most markets the brand owner named on the pack carries the legal responsibility for the product, so you make the recall or withdrawal decision and you own the communication to the regulator and the retailer. The co-manufacturer holds almost everything you nee...
19 October 2026 · 3 min
How do you know an incident is actually closed?
An incident is closed when you can show, with evidence, that the affected product is accounted for, the cause is understood, the corrective action is in place and verified, and everyone you told about it has been told it is over. Stopping the problem is not closure. Reconcilia...
12 October 2026 · 3 min
Who holds the incident when the site is shut for Christmas
Decide now, in writing, which named person holds an incident on each day the site is closed, and give them a number that someone actually answers. Shutdown is the gap between a problem surfacing and the people who can fix it: the product you made in peak week is in homes and o...
5 October 2026 · 4 min
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