 Good morning everybody. I'm Aaron Kramer, head of B.S.R., a non-profit business network that focuses on sustainability. I'm delighted to be able to host a discussion today on the safe advantage. You know, the world moves very quickly and in non-linear ways. And this year alone, we've had Ebola in West Africa. We've had E. coli issues in the United States. Of course, there have been multiple food safety issues here in China. We've seen Fukushima, Sandy, no region of the world, no community in the world. None of us individually can take safety for granted. And we also know that in addition, of course, to our personal exposure for business, this is an absolutely crucial issue. Trust is the kind of thing that gets built over a long period of time and it can be destroyed in a nanosecond, very, very fast. There is a famous quote from a 19th century American writer, Mark Twain, who said that a lie makes its way around the world before the truth puts on its pants. I hope our translators today can translate that. And he said that before there was WeChat, Snapchat, Vine, Instagram, or any of the tools that, of course, have just accelerated our world. So we want to explore all of that today. This is something that affects all of us as consumers, as family members, and we've got four great business leaders to talk about how they're thinking about it. I should just note from the program, unfortunately, one of our plan speakers, Mr. GoGo, was not able to GoGo or get here thanks to a long flight delay coming from, I think, from North America. We've got four great people here and we're going to dive right in. So I want to start by, I'll ask a couple of questions and ask each of you to respond. And then I'll follow up with some questions for each of you individually. And I want to make sure to open it up. We're in a round room so that we can be as participatory as possible and hopefully get into a great dialogue. So let me start first and ask each of you. And starting with Catty Lam from PepsiCo. How have consumer expectations changed over the last five, ten years? If you can answer that question, we'll go around, get each of your perspectives on that. Catty. I want to start by addressing the audience and good morning and really happy to be here, to help this forum to talk about really important issues. But most of the dialogue is going to be in Chinese because I think that that's appropriate also for the audience. We're in China. So first of all, I would like to say good morning to all the participants. I'm very honored to be participating in today's forum on a very important issue. First of all, I will be talking mostly in Chinese to tailor more towards the Chinese audience in China. Maybe they don't have to rely on the headset so much. Erin proposed a very important question about the change in expectation of consumers on safety. In the past, we've noticed that there had been a lot of spotlight shied on the food security. Consumer definitely paid a lot more attention to food security and safety. I think this is very closely linked to the emerging of the social media and new media. Also, people are gaining more awareness on the health issues. Consumers themselves are treating safety issues with their utmost attention. So they pay them. They follow a lot more closely. We noticed that with the role of the new media, that issue have increased their exposure. I think we'll we'll get into the question of how media are changing things trying to focus later on on how do they change your life day-to-day? How do you have to respond in real time? You've led your company and been with your company for quite some time and you've seen really the entire reform period in China. So in additional last five or ten years, I wonder if you can think how Chinese perspectives on safety have changed your life over that period. I am from Zhongji Island and we manufacture maritime food. Thanks to the opening up and reform in the past years, the dispensable income level had increased, has been increasing. And as a result, this is changing their diet structure. There is new demand for the food that consumers want in recent years. The central government have attached great importance to food safety as a result, direct result of the food scandals. Madam Lin had mentioned that the role of new media has accelerated the awareness, penetration among the society as a whole. It's no longer limited to one region or one enterprise. It's become an international issue certainly. Therefore, it had helped the consumers as a whole to pay closer attention to food safety. After that, I want to touch upon the point that the government has been improving regulations governing food safety and implementation and law enforcement have stepped up as well. So all of these forces joining hands together are pushing the consumers to even pay closer attention to it. In the past years, we have noticed that with the increased consumption power, the confidence among consumers have been dropping. Therefore, consumers have less trust even though they want to consent more. It makes it difficult for businesses and it is also proposing a challenge to the economy's development as a whole. Thank you. So we have social media, bottom-up dynamic. We have rising income, consumer information, another bottom-up trend, and then the top-down trend of increased enforcement by the government. Tim, I'm going to come back to you in a minute, but let's go to the third food manufacturer retailer we've got here. Nandu, tell us a little bit about your perspective about how opinions and expectations around safety have changed in recent years. Thank you, Aaron. Look, the first thing to, and let's pull back and look at this from a broader and global perspective, the first thing to realize is today, for the first time in the history of humanity, 50% of humanity now lives in urban areas. So one in every two human beings lives in a city somewhere. This means the only way, and this is accelerating, and the only way you can make food available in urban areas is by having sophisticated food supply chains and processing of food that keeps food fresh and preserved till it reaches the consumer. And this obviously then leads us to the questions of food safety. And the second point here is in actual fact, we have made enormous progress in food safety, which we tend to discount in the light of some of the recent scandals that have happened. Reportedly in the United Kingdom, when pasteurization of milk was introduced coming into the urban areas, rates of tuberculosis dropped by 75%. So there's a lot of positive force in the controls introduced along the value chain. Having said that, there is no getting away from the fact. You alluded to a few food safety scares in recent times. There have been issues which have cropped up in various different parts of the world on food safety. And not just on food safety, also on food adulteration, sometimes deliberate, which is quite a criminal kind of an act. So what could be the response in this kind of a scenario? And I'd like to present a three-pronged response, really. The first response is the consumer part and consumer awareness, Cathy and Mr. Wu referred to is a very important part of increasing the pressure on food safety throughout the value chain. The second response is regulatory. And again, Mr. Wu referred to it, governments are taking a more proactive stance in making sure that standards are put, that they are adhered to across the value chain. And the third response has to be from industry. And with an industry, and I go back and refer to one word that you used, which in Nestle is very important to us, and that is trust. The ultimate objective of everything we do in Nestle is to build trust in Nestle. And the surest way to build trust is through every one of the one billion times a day somebody chooses and uses a Nestle product somewhere in the world. The fastest way to lose trust is to have bad quality or safety in that product. So within this context of building trust, there are a number of things we can do and we do do. And I just talk about it in three buckets. The first is what are we doing to monitor? We have across the world more than a thousand scientists who are engaged in monitoring food safety. Every day we have more than 260,000 tests that are conducted to make sure that the raw materials and finished products are of the highest standard in our manufacturing chain. The second thing is to ensure traceability. And to ensure traceability we are doing a lot of backward integration. We have more than almost 700,000 farmers who we work with all over the world. Last year alone we provided direct assistance to upgrade the capabilities of 300,000 farmers all over the world. We have a thousand agronomists working to do this. Traceability is embedded in our supply chain. Consumers can go and scan the QR code at the bottom of the can to trace where the product came from and in what batch it is and all kinds of details about the product. So we have a lot of investment happening on monitoring, on traceability. In Beijing we just opened our Food Safety Institute that we were talking about earlier and this is something that is open and this brings me to my third point of our response which is to be able to work with regulators and industry bodies to help to frame and shape the regulations to ensure the highest standard of food in the entire value chain. So the Food Safety Institute is something which is open to regulators and scientific institutions to come and work to help to upgrade standards across the industry. So it's a long journey but it's a journey that's worth it because ultimately the only way to build a sustainable business over a long period of time and to support this whole trend of urbanization is to build trust. It comes back to that word trust. If you put that front and center of your mission it's obvious what one has to do. Thank you. I think I'm glad you mentioned urbanization. We talked about social media, rising expectations and I think you make a very important point which in fact our food chain may be safer than it was a hundred years ago but because of the flood of knowledge it may not appear so. Someone from another food company said that serves 50 million people a day said if you have a one in a million event we have 50 of those every day. So the scope of these businesses I think is part of the challenge. Tim I wanted to have you in the fourth spot here because you work with a lot of companies like this including companies in other sectors apart from food. So you have a very good perspective on how things have changed from Ecolab. How have expectations changed over the last five years or so? Well both as a consumer myself and also as you point out that Ecolab would do well with people I mean the companies in the food and beverage and many industries that helping them to deal with the food safety challenges including many of the companies on the stage. First of all from consumer aspect and I do think like many Chinese people we changing from making sure we have enough food to feed the family to actually the quality and safety become our top concern and nutrition's quality and safety become our top concern. So and I really the whole change is driving the change and evolution of the industries and from a consumer behavior change or exploitation change standpoint we did a lot of research with our customers and also with the industry associations and one of the questions that we ask our customers which is consumer to answer is when they decide what to buy or what restaurants to go to and what are the criteria they use to make decisions and we saw a pretty dramatic change in the last five years especially after the manning the whole food scandal happened. It used to be it started with taste right I want to make sure these things are tasting good and and price because consumers are more sensitive to price but now more and more you find that the taste and price become the third or fourth or even fifth that decision making criteria for them is the number one is become food safety. They want to make sure that they go there and they can feel safe to take their customers or take their families to and number two is the quality which is also more or less linked to the food safety. So we do think the overall consumer expectations is evolving of course the government regulations that you point out are evolving like as having a dramatic impact on on the overall the food industries that enlarge in China but also I mean I would say globally. Thank you very much. One question for all of you and then I'll I'll focus in a little bit. The title of the session is the safe advantage but I wonder do you think there's really an advantage or is this avoidance of of risk. Do you do companies get rewarded in the marketplace for having the kind of quality and authenticity that Tim is speaking to. I'll go no order here. Yeah go ahead. Right well if we look at the title of the session it's about safety being a competitive advantage which is kind of unfortunate because it's something that consumers ought to be able to rely on food being safe but the fact that it's become the title of this session is because of a lot of things that have happened which have told us that there's a certain insecurity out there. Now whether it's in the upstream or downstream or business government corporation food safety should actually be the bottom line for all of us it should be guaranteed by all of us compared to innovation brands and so on. I mean the latter should be competitive advantages rather than food safety. Now I actually agree with the point that should be made that food safety is more of a concern for people than before. We need to make further effort to reassure consumers. We actually have a commitment at PepsiCo for example sustainable human development, sustainable environmental development and sustainable training of people. Now human and environmental sustainable development both include food safety as an element. Now we produce and sell products that we're proud of and trust is a huge part of that and it's a huge part of our staff being proud of the products that they sell. It's part of corporate culture in fact a lot of processes and monitoring mechanisms depend for their implementation effective implementation on corporate culture the ability of all of our people to work together so that with the help the company can continuously improve. Now I would say at this point that besides rules and laws and systems we also have when we talk about implementation the issue of corporate culture which is decisive and it's also about the relationships that we have at the industry level and with the regulators. These decide whether or not we can guarantee food safety for the consumer. Consumers previously wouldn't really expect there to be a problem maybe that's different today they know more and what they've seen some of it causes concern. We need to give a response we need to persuade the consumer that they don't need to worry and that's the key lesson that I take from our session today. You measure whether the brand or or certain products anyway are benefited by this approach can you quantify that? It's hard to do. Well if you're talking about qualitative criteria for food safety or as a part of corporate performance then it divides into two aspects in fact firstly whether or not consumers have confidence I mean we actually very seldom worry about you know what company produced this where it's come from. I mean when you're dealing with a big company the sort of reassurance that you should give to the consumer is an overall sort of confidence in product quality. Now can you put a quantitative finger on it well it's very difficult over the past year or so there's been a survey and the results for China as follows trusted brands by Chinese consumers include all of our products now I'm confident in third party surveys but also we've done internal surveys and these surveys have been not just about what products they trust but why so we're aware of the results of those surveys but it's harder to break it down further in mathematical or number terms I don't think it should be a matter of numbers it should be a basic guarantee that people enjoy. I'd like to please agree with Kathy food safety should actually be a foundation of any responsible food manufacturer but what builds a competitive advantage is how well your culture allows you to keep that foundation intact year after year after year and then you build a reputation and that's where the reputation then comes and gives you trust eventually so and if we measure I know in the case of Nestle we do measure the corporate equity in with quantitative measures and qualitative as well and we what we see across the world one theme that gets played back consistently and China is also the exactly the same is that over time people come to associate Nestle with quality and that is not I mean it was not designed to be a competitive advantage it has evolved to become one simply because of consistency over time and I I think and I'd like to test this with you there's a self-reinforcing element of this because if it's culture that drives safety presumably culture is also strengthened when people see that the company is doing things the way that they would like and so that and willing to make hard decisions occasionally when you have to make a hard decision they would you know when you're willing to take the hard calls and inside people say yes we're serious about it trust has to be earned internally not just externally or just external Tim then and Mr Wu so so again we are more more less objective in this when we look at the the food safety as a competitive advantage and and since we work with companies with like that Nestle perhaps it was a great brand awareness and versus some companies are still in a very early stage of establishing your brands and we do everything that's a a very clear competitive advantage when when you perceived value by the consumers that your food you the food safety is not an issue or your quality is good and consistency the consistency is there and that's why we we think having the culture having the processes is critical and and then and and in update the food safety is also a matter of investments in order to establish the food safety culture you need to make investments in order to establish the food safety processes and infrastructure you need to make the investments and investment is a financial equations so so we actually encourage especially the customers who are still in an early journey of establishing the food safety culture is to consider and either quantify try to quantify maybe not necessarily benefit by the cost of food safety and which is you can easily by refer to some of the the incidents happened in the industry sale what would happen if there's any negative publicity related to our brains about companies and how likely impact us and so the cost side of the the food safety is a lot easier to quantify the the upside or the benefit side of it so when you put the cost in the equations and all of a sudden investing some money to strengthen your food safety culture strengthen your food safety processes the foundations become a much easier decisions because ultimately as a company the final every decisions comes to financial equations so I do think I mean of course for Pepsi and Leslie this has become a given to you it become part of your culture is less of issues but for many other companies this is a something I do encourage those companies to to consider doing that I think it's a very good point Tim people should not look at investment and food safety and quality as a cost but they should look at it as one of the foundation essentials of doing business properly in a sustainable way yeah you won't get me to argue with that point at all mr. Wu how do you think you have an advantage in the marketplace because of your reputation for quality and safety首先應該 sure well firstly food safety definitely is a competitive advantage although rationally speaking it is the bottom line the actual incidents that are happening with food safety are not just in the developing world however for example in the USA with the adding of water to seafood products now that's partly a safety issue but also very much about quality assurance following the Fukushima incident in Japan with the marine pollution that occurred and the inability to immediately control the consequences of that now australian and well particularly australian but also new zealand prawn and lobster is often smuggled via vietnam to china which means that it's actually avoiding all the quality regulation and checks that are thought to be going through so there's a risk to the consumer if you don't have the necessary systems laws and regulations in place and working then the food safety marketplace becomes chaotic so it's not just about the bottom line it's also about capacity the ability to get things done now everybody knows that there's no action that doesn't affect the environment there's nothing happens in the environment that doesn't affect food there's nothing that affects with food that doesn't affect people so it's very clearly about capacity building and that's something that every business should be doing some businesses want to make it one of their criteria but they don't have the capacity or the ability or sometimes even the money to actually get it done properly to get that capacity built up now why do I say it's about competitiveness not just because of that it's also about one of the basic building blocks of your brand whether it's pepsi or nestle or jung zedal my company for that matter if you don't take food safety seriously enough then you simply can't build a brand and you can't build a healthy corporate culture in that respect well we produce seafood how do we regulate our own food safety chains how do we increase our capacity in that regard first starting from the procurement we have regulated specific zones where we procure from that's one thing and also I agree with madam lin that it's about corporate culture how you position to yourself when you establish the company and how you see yourself develop in the future you need to ask whether you want to make money or you want to benefit the people and that will decide the tone for the corporate culture as a whole and that will the intern place an important impact on the safety insurance after that I want to touch upon the necessity of enhancing laws and regulations without which without effective monitoring or independent in monitoring what we're talking about are in veins developed countries definitely stepped ahead of us in terms of either the formulation of the regulation nor or the implementation for developing countries we have a long way to catch up and we on top of those we need to have the systems and processes in place to further ensure that our products meet the safety requirement with all of these factors putting together I believe we will be able to make food safety a competitive edge so four strong votes for culture as being crucially important I think that's a very good insight let me ask one question ask you to respond very briefly and then I want to open it up for questions from from all of you you know in the news this week is yet another example of hacking and information being held in the cloud that is basically stolen now as we move towards an internet of things as we as we begin to think about how enterprises are connected in that regard it becomes not very hard to think about how hackers can turn from taking photographs of celebrities to manipulating the extensive information systems you have that that look after this and in some cases interfering with machinery that's operating to do some of the testing that you're talking about is this on your radar screen what looking ahead is this something that that keeps any of you awake at night at Nestle we do have a very rigorous program of an early warning system where we try to look out and look at the environment to look at what are the issues that may crop up not just today but in a few years from now looking at the leading edge of science and it's not only on food safety but also on information security and we try to then anticipate some of these issues and build them into our processes to make sure we have the safeguards built in this is a very important part of maintaining the sustainability over time and that's what the culture allows us to do going back to food safety for instance we know you know I distinguished earlier between deliberate contamination of the food chain and a food safety issue simply because of bad management of the food chain now there's a third one in there actually which is today more and more detection technologies have progressed to a point where you can detect elements in parts per billion that previously nobody was aware that these elements were then where did they come from they come from nature they come from the grass the cow eats you know and and that is creating a whole new dimension because simply the detection technologies even if it is well below safety limits can be blown up by consumer reaction by media to become something that people then react very strongly to and so all of these we have to anticipate and try and stay ahead of the curve to try to preempt and prepare ourselves for some of these issues before they happen is deliberate interference with with food system something that is in the top 10 of risks at Nestle these days it's well I wouldn't say it's something that's specific I mean it's contamination of the food chain is something that we have been checking for for a long time as long as we've had milk coming from farmers we have not only looked at microbiological quality and basic fat protein balance and but also at possibility of any contamination so we have had fairly rigorous systems going back for a century more than a century now and as technology progresses as we are more able to detect we upgrade the level of tests that we do deliberate interference with with quality is this something you're concerned about every year in Pepsi we would conduct risk assessment in the corporate management food safety has always been prioritized within the internal assessment process it's not ranked as one the top level risk segment every year we would have a specific procedure to assess to assess the risks involved from the procurement to the logistic to the processing to the treatment based on also the feedback we receive from R&D center to the product control we would conduct all the assessments so risk assessment has always been on our agenda in terms of the level of risks currently within Pepsi within our management and corporate governance structure we don't rank it as high as some of the other issues but again it's considered as one of the thresholds it has however always been on our agenda always on our radar we would conduct annual checks annual assessments and improvements and also we would look into the awareness and the attention level that given by the staff so this is a routine measure that we take at Pepsi given how open everything is and how everything is traded nowadays starting traceability to the very source and origin certainly impose challenges in other words food safety would probably have a higher risk level compared with 10 years ago because we're looking at different logistic links and different processes regard and with regard to that we also notice that it provides us a brilliant opportunity because of the internet of things because of the development of technology we are able to implement on hands control of all the processes the cold chain logistics the development of the cold chain logistics is definitely beneficial to the storage the safe storage and logistics for food given that my company is a food stuff company we attach great great importance to the not only the product safety but also the safety to the environment it I must say on our agenda it probably enjoys a higher status of course I must say that we need to borrow expertise and factors from other fields for example from the academic from the other independent consultancy as well as management professionals to help us to even further enhance our control and also I must say media's role is very important it kind of helps us to ensure that the transparent process is implemented and with the information disclosure the timely information disclosure is crucial to our enterprise before we have had incidents of course but because of the blocked information channels consumers were probably not as aware so I agree with what Kathy just said now even though we hear more about these incidences but we need to know that there are less incidences the the whole hacking and how I relate to our food safety systems and also the the whole traceability set of equations and and and we actually often ask by our customers to help them provide the informations to both monitor their food safety but also improve their operational efficiencies like both in the water or in a food safety processes and and we actually have our own the system we call the 3d tracer systems that use in the industrial water treatments and also using in the cleaning in place processes and and critical part of our consideration because our system directly linked with our customers manufacturing or production processes so so the the system integrity is critical because if it is any hacking into our systems they can also go to impact you're out of business right I mean so so I think so you the the the questions you addressed was one of the things that are fundamental to to our service to our customers and also to our competitive advantage and then and then going to the whole making sure the whole food chain are having the integrity you know food safety we we we are one of the biggest providers in the cleaning sanitation chemicals and and processes in our customers and and we don't want our chemical become a source of contamination which is actually happens in in in other places sure and and that's why when we manufacture our sanitizers or cleaning chemicals and we actually use the same gmp process as any food food and beverage companies they produce in the processes and and the entire processes have to be following a good manufacturing processes and last but not least and I do think this is not necessarily unique to China but more severe in China is when we look at the overall food chain impact on the food safety we we cannot overlook the potential impact on the environmental pollution in China because a big part of our the ingredients coming from water and China as we all know the industrial water pollution is a big part of our issues and when you take the water from the ground and if you are not careful and this can be a a greater source of the contamination is going to the food chain so so now we actually involving many of the the industry associations research and conference and we we gradually had that besides the adulterations and we talk about and besides the full-born illness and and water and soil contaminations and not a major threat to our food safety then we talk about rice being contaminated we talk about the manufacturing process being contaminated so I I don't think a systematic view of the overall food safety is critical for us to making sure that we don't have anything that can come back and hurt our consumers human health you know food safety environmental health they're absolutely linked let's um let's hear some questions or comments from all of all of you we've got I think a couple of microphones around I believe and I see three four hands let's take the questions let's take three at a time and if you can identify yourself and your organization and keep questions brief we'd all be very appreciative let's start with with with our friend right here and then we can go to the gentleman in blue okay thank you very much for sharing my my question will can you identify yourself too okay thank you my name is Xia Xia I come from international finance news and the people's daily um because nowadays in China I think safety for food people worry about most is the genetic modified food everyone is talking about it so but now in China we do not have a clear standard about genetic modified food currently but we already know that a lot of food already have genetic modified factors in it especially some very famous brands and so my question first will goes to um currently because everyone is so worried about it but no one is offering the answer whether it's safe or not because people are worried maybe it's effect will not be only in decade but for hundreds of years maybe after hundred years we we can see the effect of genetic modified food so currently do you think that it's a good chance for the big brands to get the chance from your consumer if you can guarantee that at least I do not say it's safe or not I say I guarantee if I have genetic modified factors in my food I will show you I will tell you exactly so that's the first question and the second is let's try and keep it very brief because I want to get questions in from others so let's and the second question is let's and then we've got a couple over here and then we'll get to know I'm from net ease and I would like to ask the guests in particular from Nestle and pepsi co a lot of your products contain food additives and a lot of such chemical food additives are harmful to health even if they are allowed under national standards do you not see a paradox here let's go and and I would ask that everyone identify themselves gentlemen right here and then the gentleman in the back I'm Jeff come from a living social and commercial foundation uh okay um frankly speaking having listened to the executives from pepsi co and Nestle one thing that I haven't heard from these major brands is whether you think you deserve people's trust and I think that's really a question that has to be asked given a lot of things that have gone on you don't automatically get that trust in many cases people don't have a trust if I don't go to kfc which is done by pepsi co then where do I go often there's no choice now okay kfc isn't a pepsi but I'm sure that there are a lot of subsidiaries of pepsi in the same way where you don't have real consumer choice now in China you have a lot of family farms and small and medium enterprises and so on and micro enterprises in China what innovative approaches can be adopted by market actors like that question then we'll hear some answers hi everyone my name is Ajay I've come from India I work for a technologies company and thanks for some very interesting viewpoints you shared with us a while ago I'm very keen to know how are we empowering the consumers who are the most impacted of the lot because I think the real power or the teeth as if we call it for safety would come from consumers so if they're more empowered learn it and know most about the aspects so are we transparent are we empowering them to know more about our products I would like to know something in this thank you very much some great questions let me try to bundle them and I think first I do want to give our colleagues from from pepsi co and Nestle the chance to answer the the direct and very very provocative question about do do you deserve trust I think that's in the minds of of many people then then maybe we'll hear a little bit about what information goes to consumers including about GMOs because I think that fits together very well and then we can talk about additives also but but first would you like to go first about you know how do you deserve trust I want to respond to the question well there are a couple of things that I would like to make clear firstly pepsi co contains food and drink departments you're familiar with pepsi color we also have other products and Jia De Le and Chun Gu Le which is a fruit juice brand and we also have Quaker Oats which is a subsidiary of ours and we have Lay's potato chips these are some of the major brands in our stable now at the factory level but also at the field level what a lot of what we do is signing memoranda of understanding with agricultural departments we have tens of thousands of farmers who supply us and who are audited every year for their use of fertilizer environmental performance irrigation and so on we communicate with them every year we also have training activities together with the government for them apart from that element in terms of our management and selection of inputs we have various standards to ensure that everything that reaches our factory floor has guaranteed safe we also have SOP monitoring and monitoring of our products in the market as well now I won't go into detail because again that's something that could easily run up to three hours or longer if I was to expound on that in full so that was just a basic overview of our food and drink monitoring and guarantee efforts now it's been said just now that big brands don't deserve trust well actually the fact that these brands have decades or centuries of history is not a coincidence they have maintained quite strong consistency and continuity over the years including in quality terms now there's a lot of media coverage of incidents and scandals when they happen involving big brands that's something that automatically draws the attention of consumers but it doesn't mean that such problems don't happen with small brands small companies so big brands automatically get more coverage but if you go back over the history that we have at Pepsico in food terms we really haven't had that many problems that have happened now a lot of that's about internal management and processes but also credit to our people at Pepsico we're very proud of our retail and sales people including in procurement it's very fast usually for them to get back to us if any problems are found I have been at Pepsico for 20 years one thing that we are very proud of is the fact that it was very easy for us to decide on that kind of food safety policy because it's part of our core mission it's as simple as that a brand with a history of over 100 years can't afford to sacrifice that I think I think the answer to summarize was yes big brands do deserve trust if they're doing the right things and we just heard numerous examples but Nandu let's let's let's hear your perspective on this and I do want to make sure we get to the other questions yep I'll try and cover all four questions in a in a very summarize yes no Tuesday absolutely right short answers but look trust is not something that's a given trust is something that you earn every single day and trust is easy to lose and you have a product which is bad quality or not safe or is found to have contaminants that are not supposed to be there it's easy to lose and when we design our products and we have our culture of quality and compliance this is something that has existed today for 150 years and this reputation is not a given consumers don't come and say yeah Nestle you're a big company so I trust you consumers and we have a lot of competition so you have enough choices in every single category to go and buy competition so it's not that we don't have competition you earn it every single day and the consumer at the end of the day it's also our own families we are human beings my family consumes Nestle products and we don't have additives when we sell pure soluble coffee it has pure soluble coffee nothing else when it's full cream milk powder it's full cream milk powder there are no additives I fully agree if there is any use of genetically modified ingredients these have to be declared because these can be traced and there are now more and more regulations across countries that make it mandatory for companies to declare genetically modified ingredients on labels but but in in this context you know it's even uh stuff that you don't see and how and I'd like to share a little story and an example that goes along the you know to kind of reassure you briefly briefly what corn yeah there's a lot of corn that is consumed in Africa and we use a lot of corn as a raw material in making some of our products in in Africa and we have very strict norms on the corn for the amount of mycotoxins or aflatoxins in the the corn because these are very toxic to human health and what we found was that we were rejecting at a point in time 50 percent of the corn that came to us from the farmers because they were full of aflatoxins or mycotoxins which have basically come because of fungal infection and the fungi back battle each other and they release toxins to kill each other but they have side effects on human health so we went in and the supply chain and we looked with farmers and we were able to identify that the reason for this mycotoxin infection was the way they were harvesting the corn they harvested it and then they stored it on the earth in a big heap so high humidity high moisture warm temperatures growth of fungal sports mycotoxins release by changing the method of storing instead of keeping it in a big heat store it on concrete and keep it in a flat you were able to reduce the amount of mycotoxin infection 50 50 percent down to 5 percent that improved the livelihood of the farmers it also reduced the risk of contamination from by taking it out of the supply chain yeah so that's the way we actually work in a very proactive way across the supply chain to manage this your point on on empowering consumers is very appropriate modern more modern technology allows us the opportunity to get people to use so as I mentioned earlier in China you can actually consumers can go and scan the QR code at the bottom of the can and they can link directly to see where the scan came from what batch codes now is it as sophisticated as it could be definitely not because we have to kind of catch up with technology because technology is making so much more possible I fully expect that we will be in a position to offer a great deal more empowerment to consumers to see what is in the products and where the product comes from over the next five years I think this is going to be a huge revolution in the area of food technology thank you very much let's have I wanted to give Tim a chance to to respond very briefly how do we address consumers effectively GMOs and additives trust close us out by taking on one or a couple of those but I'll need you to be pretty brief thank you on GMOs I would like to say that it is about the capacity of scientists and popular awareness of GMOs at the same time because there's too many unknowns any product should have full disclosure made to consumers of its ingredients that's what I'd like to say on GMOs now on the right to know that's very important because we're also talking about user culture if we had that real user culture then things would be much better if consumers were more active in taking the matter into their own hands they right would be better enforced now if companies had less monopolistic tendencies then the right to know would be better now finally regulators must ensure that all the information the consumer deserves is provided as a precondition for the product going onto the market that would be a way to protect the right now better qr codes have just been mentioned just now and that's a very good example of sort of innovation that can improve communication with consumers and improve the consumer experience thank you very much well we actually started a conversation before we started conference of this panel is what is the number one thing that China needs to do I mean here's specific China like to improve the food safety and what's the weakest link and and it's also comes back to the point of consumer education and we actually did a quite a bit of research with our industry partners and industry associations and we found that there are a lot of myths or miscommunications about all the food safety issues being exposed in the newspapers and in fact we took the team the the food safety incidents that occurred in the last five years and asked the expert to re-analyze them and we found a seven out of ten was a more miscommunication misperceptions the real food safety issues so how do we make sure that we actually help the consumers understand that then give them more empowerment to to really uh the the monitor and improve the overall food safety standards in China that that's critical and and that's where the the industries uh the the scientists academics and government media and consumers they all play a role here and and last but not least is if you look at the newspaper talk about food safeties you're nine out of ten although I would say ten out of ten is about negative publicity in China we actually need positive energies because I do think there are many companies I mean all the companies that are on the stage and many other companies that are doing the right thing and they have a lot of good practices and and and promote so promoting those best practices is actually more important in this stage of the industry developments to to promote the overall food safety standard and that's one of the reasons that we work together with the medias and and with the industry associations to start a a war system called Seven Star and and and which is I mean we can talk three hours again in the Seven Star but the the point of that is to to help promote the best practices among the the food industries about how they do and why they deserve the trust and and and helping to gain the trust of the the industry I think this is the getting the consumers aligned and getting the educations and also getting the trust and confidence the confidence back into the industries are critical to develop the the industries in China great thank you excellent way to close I want to thank all four of you we've heard about some very quantitative things science technology testing monitoring crucially important we've heard about big institutional decisions the importance of smart regulation follow-up enforcement let's remember we have these supply chains that go well beyond national borders and so so regulation is important but it's also limited but interestingly I think a lot of our discussion focused on in a sense the software culture corporate culture consumer awareness the fact that transparency is not the same thing as meaning let's remember that there's a lot of information in the world but that doesn't mean we understand things better in all cases so a very interesting and rich discussion I want to actually I want to invite all of you to thank to join me in thanking our four speakers this morning very much appreciate your insights and all of you being with us thank you very much