Hazards of the modern food supply chain

In the US food system, workers tasked with moving products are at a high risk of serious injury, according to a Penn State-led study. This situation has worsened due to supply-chain problems caused by the pandemic.

According to lead researcher Judd Michael, Penn State professor of agricultural and biological engineering, the modern food supply chain presents hazards to employees that result in higher rates of death and injury when compared to most other industries. Employees in food manufacturing, wholesaling and retailing experience relatively high numbers of occupational injuries and fatalities.

One reason for the high hazard rates may be the reliance on a synergistic packaging system designed to load and transport food products within and between manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, Michael noted. In the modern system, food products are aggregated and transported after they have been packaged, requiring potentially dangerous machinery, equipment and methods to accomplish those tasks, Michael explained.

“Materials handling and movement within and between facilities is critical to the efficient functioning of all links of the food-related supply chain, but product movement can be a source of occupational injuries,” he said. “For example, manufacturers often use palletisers to aggregate individually packaged food products into a unit load before they can be transported using a pallet jack, forklift or other powered industrial truck.”

Michael said that the COVID-19 pandemic prompted the research after he and his team were curious about the effects of the added pressure on the food supply chain on workers.

In the first year of the pandemic, news reports suggested the food supply chain was not keeping up with the new demands from the pandemic. The way food was prepared, packaged and moved needed to be changed as more people stayed home.

“Suddenly, we weren’t eating out at restaurants, we were going to the grocery store or ordering online much more and buying food products that we hadn’t purchased the same way before,” Michael said. “We suspected this put a lot of pressure on the workers in the food supply chain. And we wanted to try to document that, to highlight the increase in injuries during the first part of the pandemic when the food supply chain was under tremendous pressure.”

He added that this research aimed to emphasise the importance of the blue-collar food industry workers.

To conduct the research, the team used a database maintained by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to investigate all severe injuries in the years from 2015 to 2020 in the food supply chain. The results showed 1084 severe injuries and 47 fatalities during the six-year period, though actual figures could be twice as high. Data indicated that 2020 saw a significant increase in severe injuries as compared to previous years.

In findings published in the Journal of Safety Research, the researchers reported lower-extremity fractures were most prevalent and the most frequent accident type was transportation-related, for example, pedestrian-vehicle incidents.

Large retailers that sell food alongside other products, such as Walmart, Sam’s Club and Costco, were not included in the research.

“We wanted to be very narrow with our definition of a grocery store or a food retailer, and those big, multifaceted operations are not, strictly speaking, just grocery or food retailers, because food is just a part of their overall sales,” Michael said.

According to Michael, injury numbers could be considerably higher if statistics from such companies were included, though it would not have been possible to determine which of their accidents and injuries were related to moving food products.

Serap Gorucu, assistant professor of risk analysis, safety and health of agricultural systems at the University of Florida, contributed to the research.

The research was funded in part by the Nationwide Insurance Endowment for Safety & Health.

Image credit: iStock.com/EduardHarkonen