This issue's Food Safety Insights column is a continuation of the survey that we first reported in our August/September issue. That survey included over 450 food processors and food safety professionals in every category in the U.S., Canada, and from around the world. In the August/September column, we discussed the pent-up demand for projects and new initiatives that processors are hoping to return to, with some of the urgency and disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic becoming less acute. In this column, we continue to report on our results, but these questions are related to how processors are coping with regulatory demands now that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other agencies have resumed their in-person inspections. We report on industry's relationships with various agencies, but we give extra focus to the companies' relationship with FDA. Of the 450 respondents in our survey, approximately 200 reported that they are FDA-regulated facilities.
We have been monitoring the relationship that food processors have with regulators—particularly with FDA—for a number of years now. Our attention to this topic started with the implementation of FDA's Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA)—arguably the most impactful food safety regulatory change in recent memory—to watch the evolution of FDA's enforcement posture, as well as inspection and sampling procedures related to this new regulation. This evolution was somewhat disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic over the past few years, but now that FDA has resumed its regular, in-person inspections, we wanted to hear from processors whether they have had an inspection in 2022a and, if so, whether FDA collected any samples. We also asked if processors still agree that FDA "educates before it regulates."