"It was frightening to see how a few small deviations threatened our business within days," says Christian Stabell Eriksen, CEO in the Meny chain. "From representing a brand based on high quality food we were suddenly portrayed on the front page of all the newspapers as the bad guys. Instead of putting the blame on others, we were self-critical and took action. The criticism from the authorities proved to justify itself. We did not have a good enough quality system to intercept individual deviations in our shops. Our credibility was tottering and something had to be done."

Unbiased risk assessment
With 123 shops spread around the country, Meny is one of the largest high-end grocery stores chains in Norway. 65 of these are privately owned, the rest owned by the Meny chain. All shops that previously were operating in different organisational structures were brought together under a total marketing concept in 2001. The stores offer consumers a wide and tempting selection of over 12,000 products, focusing especially on fresh produce and fixed low prices.

The Norwegian authorities stated publicly that four of the shops had frozen meat defrosted and sold as fresh goods, and that old meat was minced and sold as processed meat products with new sell-by dates. The authorities demanded that changes had to be implemented immediately to prevent similar episodes from happening again.

"We were in urgent need for an unbiased risk assessment of all our shops to be able to improve the existing quality system," says Stabell Eriksen. "We called upon DNV, known by our customers as one of the leaders in safeguarding quality in shipping, to help us improve our monitoring of food safety in the shops. DNV investigated one-third of the shops, established the causes of the deviations and put forward improvement measures that are being implemented now.

It turned out that the attitudes and routines of some of our staff were not good enough. To be able to re-establish our tottered credibility, we decided to implement a total quality system that could work for all employees throughout the chain. The danger of doing business today is not to realize the consequences of our ambitions. If we let commercialism become our predominant objective, it becomes very easy to forget that the basis of any success lies in the ability to have a quality system that is good and works throughout the organisation."

Wake-up call for the industry
For the past five years, food industry in Europe has been exposed to several food scandals such as "mad cow" disease in England and the Dioxine scandal in Belgium. This has lead to very strict rules for food producers and manufacturers. However, the Norwegian commodity trade seems to have suffered from a kind of a Sleeping Beauty.

According to Gunnar Jordfall, CEO of the Norwegian Food Control Authority (SNT), 95% of the Norwegian food safety regulations are based on EU requirements, but the industry still has a way to go before attitude change.

"The Meny scandal was a wake-up call for the Norwegian food industry," says Jordfall. "Except for the big food scandals in other places in Europe, Norway has not suffered, which created a feeling of false security. The large grocery chains are very complex organisations with more diverse activities than most other business. They need to draw a lesson from the rest of the industry on how to handle risks, as they are under constant surveillance by the public and media. After all, they are the ones that threaten the food consumers are eating. To gain the public’s confidence, they have to prove they have a total quality system that enables them to control safety from production to consumers."