FOOD FOR A HARMONIZED WORLD

Story + Photos
By Sally Subhapholsiri
July , 2000

Published on August 2, 2000

QCC, KAIZEN, TQM, QMPI, GAP, GMP, LACF, ISO, HACCP. SPS, TBT.  Pick any letter or acronym from the quality and food safety vocabulary. The chances are, 100 to 1, a Thai food company would have already heard of it. For within its two decades of development, Thailand's food industry coped with and thrived in a multi-market, multi-product environment where compliance with standards from various parts of the world was a way of life and the only way to survive.

Born out of technology transfer, export promotion and co-packing, Thailand's food industry was, from the start, a buyer-driven entity. First Taiwan and Japan, then the USA and Canada, followed by Europe and Australia, lately the Middle East and ASEAN countries - companies from each market came with their requirements. Co-packing meant that Thai companies utilized local materials and local labor but packed to the overseas buyers' brands and labels.

With such efforts naturally came plenty of headaches. Rarely did the laws, regulations, specifications and requirements of governments or individual buyers agree. Thai food companies went to the extent of building separate processing lines or , in some cases, affiliated factories in different locations, in order to accommodate multifarious specifications from each market, each buyer and each product.

Moreover, regulatory focus went through a paradigm shift to mirror changing consumer perceptions of what is desirable in food . Price still mattered as in the 1970s. So did freshness and convenience which dominated the attitude to food in the 1980s. Quality and safety concepts, however, found widespread applications in the 1990s while health and environment dominate as buzzwords for the new millennium.

At the same time, the globalization of the food trade brought with it the need for some sense out of the chaos. In 1994, the Uruguay Round of trade talks established the World Trade Organization (WTO) to regulate international trade. Two technical agreements , SPS and TBT, sounded a call for standards harmonization. In 1997, the Codex Alimentarius Commission introduced revisions that made HACCP the basis for ensuring food safety in global production. Consequently, countries, Thailand included, put together measures to comply within the world arena on the basis of equivalence.

Thailand's food industry remains an internationally-oriented one. Industry sources estimate production for domestic consumption to form less than a quarter of total manufacturing output. Thai exports fit the description of food for the world, an appellation which, in the near future, is likely to change to food for a harmonized world .

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