IGD 2010: Vion chief warns grocery retailers on food security

Food security and ethical farming are moving swiftly up the agendas of most European food businesses and guaranteed supply should no longer be taken for granted, food manufacturers and retailers were warned at the IGD convention.

“Raw materials are not a tap to turn on, or off, at will,” said VION’s chief executive officer Ton Christiaanse. “The industry cannot afford to pay lip service to farming, and farming is too fragile to subsidise the rest of the food chain.”

Carbon reduction and food security must be viewed as a social commitment, and not a competitive advantage, he said.

“In less than 20 years, demand for food will increase by 50%. Production will be increasingly affected by competition for natural resources in particular land and water, competition between food, feed and fuel, increasing urbanisation, and by the need to operate in a carbon-constrained economy. We will all need to do more with less.”

However farming was not big enough to meet the challenges of increasing both efficiency and environmental sustainability alone.

VION, a private company owned by the Dutch Southern Farmers Union, turns over £2.2bn a year in the UK through farms, feed mills and processing plants for beef, lamb, pork and poultry.

Its UK business is mainly in the supply of own label meat and meat products to supermarkets. Improving production efficiency and cutting waste are priorities, including making better use of by products as animal feed sources. It has also cut more than a million food miles from its Scottish supply chain.

Animal by-products are used as ingredients in agriculture, food, pharmaceuticals and as a fuel source. Recent developments include a power station near Rotterdam being supplied with animal meal for an incinerator which provides green electricity to more than 50,000 homes, reducing CO2 emissions by of 150,000t a year. Vion also has anaerobic digesters at its operations in Germany and Holland.