We recently hosted a webcast for the Refrigerated Foods Association on how food safety professionals can use their existing documentation to better protect their companies—and themselves—when legal issues arise. Titled “Strengthening Legal Outcomes Through Food Safety Leadership,” the session trained professionals on how to leverage their food safety records to reinforce or defend legal positions in the event of a breach of warranty, recall, or product liability dispute. Bottom line up front, goof food safety records strengthen legal outcomes.
The first step in any food safety incident or warranty dispute is to hire legal counsel. How you engage outside
Believe it or not, this guy is strengthening his Company’s legal outcome
experts matters. If you hire consultants or investigators directly, their findings can become part of discovery. Opposing counsel may access damaging reports. But if your attorney retains those experts, privilege can protect their work. This shields sensitive facts from disclosure. It also gives your legal team time to assess risk and build strategy without tipping your hand. Your attorney can advise you differently if damaging information will never be disclosed to an opposing party.
Solidifying a Claim When You Are a Buyer
Receiving logs, batch-specific certificates of analysis, and test results help buyers recover damages faster when suppliers deliver bad product. These records provide early, objective proof that a supplier did not meet its product specification, which you know is the most important document in the food supply. With a clear deviation on file, your legal team can press a claim without delay against the supplier for either damages or an alternate delivery of conforming goods. If you collect this evidence under attorney–client privilege, you also protect sensitive findings. One strong, well-documented discrepancy can move a claim quickly toward resolution.
Boosting Your Defense When You Are a Seller
When you’re the seller of food products or ingredients, you strengthen your legal outcomes by thinking defensively. Batch records, traceability logs, and deviation reports are the key documents. These records do two things for you as a manufacturer. First, they identify precisely the affected lot, thereby mitigating damages. Secondly, they can help you identify the supplier responsible for causing the defect. If these documents are generated without the attorney-client privilege, thse records will work against you. Courts may treat them as admissions. To reduce that risk, run internal investigations and root cause analysis through your attorney. This preserves confidentiality and keeps sensitive findings out of discovery.
Ultimately, our message is simple: in any adverse event, attorneys need good food safety documentation to mitigate loss and identify guilty contributors in your supply chain . Proper use of attorney–client privilege, careful record-keeping, and coordinated responses with counsel are the best ways in which you can use food safety records to strengthen legal outcomes.
For companies navigating the complexities of recalls, warranties, and supplier disputes, our team is always available to help assess risk and implement protective systems—before the first letter from a regulator or customer arrives.
