Making food safer
Over the past few weeks, the Taiwanese food scare has stirred up a hornet’s nest of unworkable “solutions.”
Some have suggested that government inspectors be forced to resign for not investigating what their system was never designed to expect — until now. This approach, whenever it was tried anywhere in the world, has always encouraged people to hide problems instead of solve them.
A writer for a think tank suggested that we’d all be safer if we were willing to spend more money on famous brands instead of taking a risk with their lesser known competitors. Being a famous brand didn’t keep Hasbro, Nestle and Nike out of trouble — I could name many others. Big advertising budgets don’t avert corporate social responsibility (CSR) disasters.
Major disasters are almost always caused by inadequate systems. No matter how good a chief executive or their CSR policies are, a single flaw in CSR monitoring can result in disaster.
To take the Hasbro case as an example. Hasbro outsourced its toy making to a trusted company in Hong Kong. The chief executive of that trusted company outsourced the paint jobs to a trusted acquaintance of his in China, with the agreement that all the paint used would be supplied by the company in Hong Kong. The Chinese company bought some of the paint as per the agreement, but diluted it with cheaper lead paint. If either Hasbro or the Hong Kong company had measured paint used versus toys painted, that disaster might have been averted.
Hasbro ended up with egg on its face and the chief executive of the Hong Kong firm killed himself. No harm came to the Chinese company because using lead paint in toys was not illegal in China until months later.
For many companies, supply lines are long and very complicated. The sources for a given product can change with each batch. In many cases, it is impossible for a business or a watchdog group to adequately monitor CSR except by means of computer technology.
A communications technology professor and I have been working on the idea of encouraging the use of quick response (QR) codes to promote transparency from one end of the supply chain to the other.
Japanese companies developed QR codes to keep track of their orders in the supply chain. Since then, some companies have used QR codes to promote understanding of their products.
We believe that this same technology can be used for chief executives, watchdog groups, consumers and everyone else to effectively monitor CSR wherever QR codes are adopted.
QR codes can not solve every CSR problem, but they can be a useful tool to help businesses face many of the CSR challenges that exist today.
JERRY MILLS
Taipei
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