Food & Beverage Insurance, Benefits & Risk Advisory

Product contamination insurance and food recall insurance address different parts of the same incident and most food manufacturers carry them through separate placements that were not specifically structured to respond to the same event as a coordinated unit. Contamination coverage addresses identifying, testing and destroying contaminated product; recall coverage addresses the financial consequences of the market withdrawal — retrieval, replacement, business interruption losses and third-party customer claims. HUB’s contamination and recall advisory structures both policies to respond to the same triggering event by incorporating allergen liability endorsements for manufacturers producing products with regulated allergen profiles and import/export food safety liability for manufacturers sourcing ingredients internationally. SFCR compliance advisory supports the mandatory recall authority and Preventive Control Plan (PCP) obligations that make contamination events both insurance claims and regulatory actions.

Business interruption in a food manufacturing facility is not simply a property restoration timeline; it includes equipment procurement lead times for custom-engineered processing lines, deep cleaning and validation requirements, Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) re-inspection rights under SFCR and retailer requalification before shipments can resume. Standard BI indemnity periods of 30 or 60 days routinely fall short of actual facility restoration timelines for food manufacturers subject to these requirements. HUB's production continuity advisory incorporates extended indemnity period design, contingent business interruption (CBI) coverage for ingredient supplier disruptions and equipment breakdown coverage for the processing lines, refrigeration systems and boilers whose failure creates both property and food safety risk. Equipment valuation reviews address the insurance-to-value gap that has developed as custom processing equipment replacement costs have escalated faster than prior insurance schedule values.

Food manufacturers that have integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems with production control systems — Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA), programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and production historians — have created attack pathways from the information technology (IT) network into the operational technology (OT) environment that standard commercial cyber policies were not designed to cover. This threat is escalating quickly, with cyberattacks increasing and the cost of data breaches continuing to rise significantly. A ransomware event that locks an ERP system can halt production; an OT-specific attack can corrupt batch records or falsify food safety monitoring data, creating simultaneous cyber and food safety regulatory events. HUB’s food manufacturing cyber advisors address both the IT exposure from standard commercial systems and the OT exposure from production control systems, including the food safety regulatory response costs that an OT incident can trigger. Coverage terms are reviewed specifically for OT environment applicability, as standard cyber policies may exclude industrial control systems or limit food safety regulatory event costs in ways that create gap exposure for food manufacturers.

Co-manufacturers and private label producers carry product liability for the finished product under the brand owner's or retailer's label, alongside contractual indemnity obligations that brand owners and major retailers routinely require as conditions of the co-manufacturing agreement. A contamination event in a co-manufacturing facility creates simultaneous product liability exposure to the brand owner, the retailer and potentially consumers, while the co-manufacturer's insurance requirements may be specified in the contract at levels that do not match the actual coverage program in place. HUB's co-manufacturing liability advisors reviews contractual indemnity requirements against current program structures, identify coverage gaps between what the contract requires and what the policy provides and coordinate product liability and umbrella program design with the Casualty practice for co-manufacturers with significant retail distribution exposure.