16|Retail News|May 2020|www.retailnews.ie
The Retail News Interview
A safe pair of hands Dr Pamela Byrne, CEO of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, explains what the Covid-19 pandemic has meant for the organisation, praises the efforts of grocery retailers and reminds food suppliers of their obligations if supply chain shortages mean a change of ingredients or packaging. LIKE every other organisation in the country, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) has had to change the way it operates in the current environment. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought sweeping changes to the way we work. But for most of us, that work doesn’t just involve ensuring that the food on supermarket shelves and delivered by our local take-aways is safe to eat. Even in the midst of an international pandemic, the FSAI’s mission remains the same: to ensure safe and trustworthy food for everyone. Its CEO, Dr Pamela Byrne, is proud of the “hugely committed team”, who “really pulled on the FSAI jersey” in difficult times. “I’ve been amazed by the agility and flexibility of the team to mobilise and work through all this,” she says. “It’s not just the FSAI, though: that has been the case not just in the civil and public service but right across the private sector, companies who have changed their business model and production systems overnight.” The FSAI had been preparing for the Covid-19 pandemic for some time before it arrived on our shores, the CEO stresses: “We had been watching what was going on around the world, listening to our counterparts across Europe and listening to Government, and we started to plan internally for a situation if the Government indicated that we would have to work in a different way. We were about 24 hours from really getting it nailed down when the Taoiseach made his announcement on Thursday, March 12, regarding schools closing, so like every organisation, a significant cohort of staff were effectively unavailable on the Friday because they had to look after their children. “I asked the staff who could come into the FSAI to please do
so – we respected social distancing and took every precaution we could in terms of hand sanitisers etc. But we were also working hard to make sure everyone was technology-enabled and so that when they left the business on that Friday afternoon, they could work from home. We now have 100% of the organisation working from home.” A fundamental shift One of the big challenges was to ensure that access to the FSAI system from outside the building was secure and did not compromise any data or sensitive information. But the pandemic has meant a more fundamental shift in the way the Authority operates. “We had to work out what the pandemic and its effects mean for the FSAI as an organisation,” explains the CEO. “How do we still deliver on our vision of safe and trustworthy food for everyone? We had to take our mission and our strategic goals and embed them into a new way of working, with everyone working remotely. We had to move from an organisation that was built around a regular Monday-Friday, 9-5, to become a task-based organisation; figuring out what needs to get done, how we get it done and in what timeframe. We have navigated that successfully and the management team are working really well with both the senior leadership team and their individual teams.” Covid-19 Incident Response Team The FSAI set up a Covid-19 Incident Response Team within the organisation. “That was about coordinating the business activities that are necessary to maintain business continuity
