August 2006 News

Food safety – what do consumers really think?

Food safety is clearly paramount to consumers.

With 100% rating ‘making sure the food they make is safe to eat’ as a primary expectation from manufacturers’. Click the chart thumbnail for a closer look.

Thankfully for MSTS, the third most important priority for manufacturers’ in the view of the consumer is to ‘make sure products taste as good as they can’.    We don’t need to remind you who to come to with help on that front!

Specific issues such as having diet or organic versions of products, although important, are less so than food safety. Click the chart thumbnail for a closer look.

Trust in manufacturers’ on food safety is an issue

However, consumer trust in manufacturers is trailing well behind the importance they place on food safety.    21% of consumers completely trust manufacturers to sell products that are safe to eat, but 28% distrust them on this issue.   

Distrust stems from profit being seen as the main motivation for manufacturers above quality and food safety.   Poor quality ingredients and too many chemicals are also contributing to consumers’ distrust of manufacturers.   

Clearly manufacturers have a need to reassure consumers that they can be trusted to deliver safe food. Click the chart thumbnail for a closer look.

You can run but you can’t hide

Unfortunately, in a world of sophisticated communication, awareness of lapses in food safety are incredibly high.   Almost all of the consumers we spoke to were aware of the issue Cadbury has recently faced, with regards to a salmonella scare, even before we prompted them.

Manufacturers are good at saying sorry

Positively, 76% of consumers rate manufacturers’ management of the problem of food safety as being ‘well managed’ because manufacturers tend to use mass media as a conduit for information and act quickly to withdraw products from sale.

However, there is an underlying concern that this good management tends to be instigated only after the news has broken and that manufacturers may well know about a problem before the event and do nothing about it until it has been exposed to the general public.  

Article based on the views of 56 MSTS Expert Panellists who participated in a postal survey conducted 18^th – 28^th July 2006.

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