PFD Food Services: Australia’s Largest Foodservice Company

About PFD Food Services

PFD Food Services is an Australia’s largest foodservice company with a network of 65 distribution centres strategically located across the nation, turning over in excess of $700 million, and employing over than 1500 full time staff. 

The beginnings of PFD Food Services date back to 1864, when J Hill & Son commenced business as a fresh fish merchant, operating from the Melbourne wholesale fish markets. In 1943, J Hill decided to form a company that sold processed fish. In early 1999 PFD purchased Bellmac Foods, located in Narooma and Cooma following this PFD acquired Oceanfresh Distributors in Canberra, its first venture into the nation’s capital. By June 2000 PFD acquired the Foodservice division of Norco. With 13 distribution centres throughout New South Wales and Queensland, making PFD a true eastern seaboard distributor with access to close to 90% of the nation’s population.

 The core business of PFD Food Services is the supply and delivery of an extensive range of food products to their customers in the foodservice industry, which includes local and regional cafes, restaurants, hotels, hospitals, schools, clubs and corporate franchises. PFD Food Services support their customers with fresh and frozen meat, seafood, dry and chilled goods, food packaging and cleaning products. 

Maintaining best practice in food safety, each of PFD branches is Hazard Analysis & Critical Control Point (HACCP) accredited and distinguished by individual distribution and customer service facilities with each site supported by a Branch Manager, Foodservice Specialists, Customer Service Representatives, Delivery Drivers and trained Operations staff. 

The experience and unwavering commitment has cemented PFD reputation as an industry leader and a source of innovation.

Risk is anything that threatens project or limits the ability of achieving its goals and objectives. It is an effect of uncertainty on objectives (AS/NZS ISO 31000:2009).

Risk management is a process of thinking about all possible risks, disasters or problems before they happen in systems, and setting up procedures that will avoid the risks, or reduce its damage and cope with it. In other words it is setting processes to identify the risk and find strategies to avoid reduce or control it.

Risk management begins with the basic questions:

1. What can go wrong?
2. What is the likelihood that it will go wrong?
3. What will we do to prevent it?
4. What will we do if it happens?

Risk management is essential for each organisation, risk engineering trying to eliminate and reduce hazards and relies firstly, on the conduct of a thorough risk assessment to identify potential hazards. Risk assessment information should be involved with quantitative analysis of uncertainties in operation, design, planning and maintenance, in engineering applications and projects environments. However, quantitative data usually not available to support risk assessments, in which case qualitative assessments are performed as an alternative. Risk assessments can be either simple or complex by using different techniques. 

Product and Service Offerings

In the risk management process there are many techniques and tools that can be used for risk engineering including:

1. Fault tree Analysis.
2. Event tree Analysis.
3. Failure modes and effects analysis.
4. Failure modes, effects and criticality analysis.
5. Cause-consequence diagrams.
6. Hazard and operability study.
7. Hazard analysis study.
8. Preliminary hazard analysis.
9. Human Reliability analysis.

The main role of a Risk Manager is to control and manage the actions of the organisation and protect against incurring any severe and or unpredictable loss, develop and maintain operational risk framework, professionally assess risks and challenge the existence of risk management measures, perform operational risk identification, risk assessment, risk response and risk monitoring within business. 

To analyse the risk, there are many steps and procedures should be done in order. Some steps for Risk Assessment are:

1. Risk identification
2. Risk analysis
3. Risk evaluation 

The Risk Manager should build on the process of managing risk by seeking answers of further questions like.

1. What can be done?
2. What options are available and what the associated trade-offs in terms of all costs, benefits, and risks? 

The procedures of analysing a risk maybe seems to be simple steps. while, in practical side it needs too much experiences, learned techniques and accuracy in order to cope with risks, particularly when a big step is taken and all the company’s reputation and the stakeholders is at stake (AS/NZS ISO 31000:2009).

 Many organizations recommend a risk engineering approach to provide other benefits which may becomes more important in the long term. These benefits include:

• Better definition of risks, and their reflection plus interactions on the project.
• Better selection and planning of mix ways to deal with risk impacts, and more flexible assessment of the appropriate solution.
• Feedback on the planning process and design in terms of preventing or avoiding risks.
• Feedback into the construction and operation of the project to mitigate the impacts of those risks, in form of response selection and contingency planning.
• Reduce risks in the project to the minimum.
• Evaluate the sensitivity of the assumption in the project development.
• Integrate the individual knowledge.
• Gives deep analysis and accurate information to improve decision making process.
• According to the Risk Management System all suppliers, investor, customer and lenders drawn to the organization 

According to the above mentioned benefits, Risk Management Plan is very important for all kind of projects.

In the PFD Food Services Company, the risks that could occur vary between operational and construction system such as risks threatened customers health and stuff safety, environment risks like water and air pollution, traffic jams, other risks like financial, decisions makers and other organization areas risks as well. There is successful process that can help to avoid and detect risk.

According to the new AS/NZS ISO 31000:2009, the process of risk management has many steps which are interacted with each. It can be seen below.

Communication and consultation is defined as an interactive process of exchange of information and opinion. It is aimed to determine best person identify evaluate and analyze risks and it should be shared with those persons who will be involved in the monitoring, treatment and review of risk.

It is very important to set up the parameters and borders where the risk management will be applied. Establishing the context considers:

• Define the goals and objectives of the risk management activities.
• Establish internal and external context.
• Define roles and responsibilities.
• Identify the available resources.
• Define risk assessment methodologies.
• Develop risk evaluation criteria.
• Define the relationship to other activities and projects.

Risk assessment is the overall process of risk identification, risk analysis and risk evaluation (AS/NZS ISO 31000:2009).

We cannot manage the risk until we identify it. Once the organization has been defined there context, then they have to utilize all the information to define the all possible risks. The aim of risk identification is to define the all possible risks that maybe affect negatively or positively on the business goals and the activity under analysis answering the following questions identifies the risk:

Food Safety and Best Practice

What can happen?

How can it happen?

Why could it happen? 

There are several ways to do this like as brainstorming, checklists, scenario analysis etc…

During the risk identification step, the Risk Manager may have identified many risks and it is not possible to solve all of them. The risk analysis step will evaluate which risks have a greater consequence than others. Risk Manager will determine the existing risk controls, and he will establish the relationship between the likelihood and consequence for each risk. This evaluation will give a better understanding of the possible impact of the risk to make decision about committing resources to control the risk.

It is important to determine how serious the risks are that the organisation is facing. The organisation Risk Managers have to determine the maximum level of risk that the organisation can accept. Risk evaluation considers the comparing level of risks that the company facing during the analysis process with previous risk criteria. The output of a risk evaluation provides a list of risks that need treatment. This step is about deciding what risks are need treatment or not.

Risk treatment involves identifying options for treating or controlling risk to solve or reduce its consequences. Risk treatment aim to enhance positive outcomes, and has strategies that will be used during the treatment step, those strategies include:

• Reduce the likelihood: limiting the chance that the risk will occur by undertaking specific actions.
• Reduce the consequence: minimise the impact of the risk that should occur by developing consequence reduction strategies.
• Share the risk: sharing the responsibility for the risk with another party who share some of the consequences if the risk occurs.
• Risk recovery plans.
• Removing the risk source.
• Avoid or eliminate the risk by ceasing an activity.
• Choosing an alternative, more acceptable activity, with less risky methodology or process.
• Inspection and process controls.
• Preventative management.
• Crisis management.
• Insurance and contractual arrangements.

Monitor and review is an essential step in the risk management process. The organisation Risk Managers have to monitor risks and review the strategies, treatment plan and management system that have been set up to manage risk. Risks need to be monitored periodically to make sure that controls are effective and efficient in both design and operation, and to ensure that the changing in circumstances does not change the risk priorities. 

There are many benefits for the organisation by recording the risk management process. It helps in the improvement of this process, it get benefits from re-using the information, continuous learning. Also, there are legal, regulatory and operational needs for records. 

There are many types of risk that could be occurred in the PFD Food Services Company which can be as the following:

• Processes are ineffective to achieve progressive goals.
• Financial fraud.
• Failure to comply with government regulations.
• Inaccuracy of Production System Design. 

To prevent the organisation from risks, there are many recommendations that should be considered throughout all the processes of the organisation. Thus the organisation will be able to achieve its goal and obtain success in the market. 

The recommendations that should be taken into account are:

1. Improve the employees’ skills by providing training programs.
2. Share the responsibilities and risks with other parties to protect property and assets.
3. Encourage all the related parties to get involved in dealing with risks.
4. Deal with occurred risk as chance to learn not to blame.
5. Set up clear plan that can identify difficult situation, and also could prepare to unpredictable event.
6. The leadership from the high level to the low level should be interacted with each.

Reference List

ACT Insurance Authority 2004, Guide To Risk Management, ACT Government, Canberra 

PFD Food Services 2007, Company Story, Areeba, viewed 14 January 2010, <https://www.pfdfoods.com.au/about/company_story.aspx> 

Standards Australia/Standards New Zeeland 2009, AS/NZS ISO 31000:2009 Risk management – Principles and guidelines, Standards Australia/Standards New Zeeland, Sydney/Wellington. 

The OurCommunity team 2009, An introduction to Risk Management, Our Community, Melbourne.