Summary
Faulty children's beds, mislabelled horsemeat burgers and exploding dishwashers are among the products recalled by companies in the UK to protect the health and safety of consumers. Evan Davis and guests discuss the process for recalling defective items and find out how quickly manufacturers and distributors must act. What are the logistics of getting back hundreds of thousands of products from consumers? And what impact does a recall have on a company's reputation? Does it reassure or unnerve customers?
Guests:
Gerard Bos, Customer Relations Manager for UK and Ireland, Ikea
Chris Dee, Chief Operating Officer, E.H Booth
Vince Shiers, Managing Director, RQA Group
Producer: Sally Abrahams.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading this programme. In this edition of the bottom line, Evan Davis and guests discuss the anatomy of product recalls. |
| 0:08.6 | Hello and welcome to the programme. Now think of all the products that are made and sold in your town or city, and then think of all the components within them. |
| 0:18.0 | Some of them are bound to be faulty, misdesigned or contaminated, and in many cases, |
| 0:24.2 | those products will have to be recalled. The questions of when to recall and how to do so |
| 0:29.5 | effectively are important ones, and I'm going to put them to my guests today who all have |
| 0:34.6 | their own experiences of dealing with product recalls. Now you might |
| 0:38.6 | associate the word recall with the big car manufacturers. The ones we contacted were, well, reluctant |
| 0:44.7 | to talk about the issue here, which implies recalls are still seen as embarrassing. We'll |
| 0:49.9 | discuss whether consumers find it scary or reassuring that companies recall their faulty products. |
| 0:56.7 | Let's start, though, by taking a few minutes to meet each of my three guests. |
| 1:00.5 | And first is Gerard Boss, who's customer relations manager for IKEA in the UK and Ireland. |
| 1:06.4 | And Gerard, I'm just thinking, goodness, how many products does IKEA in the average store actually have on sale? |
| 1:12.7 | On average, it tends to be 9,500 products at any one time. |
| 1:16.9 | So actually no more than an average supermarket. |
| 1:18.8 | How many recalls would you expect in an average year? |
| 1:22.5 | On average, it would probably be approximately 5 a year. |
| 1:26.2 | Is that all? |
| 1:27.0 | Yes, it's not that many. And your |
| 1:29.8 | concerns will mostly be anything affecting children? Obviously, yes. We recently had a recall of |
| 1:37.1 | kids' bed canopies. This was a sort of netting that hung over a cot. Yes, and we got some |
| 1:42.7 | reportings of people stating that the child would have |
| 1:45.9 | pulled it into the bed and then potentially there was a risk of strangulation. Considering we sell |
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