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The executive summary of the 2023 Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) Conference, offering insights and strategies to help food industry professionals amid supply chain disruption, has been released.

As leaders in food safety, it is our responsibility to develop the influential skills to "manage up" and "train upper management" on food safety risks and opportunities to secure the necessary funding for continued development.

In this episode of Food Safety Matters, we are joined by Dr. Steven Lyon, Director of Food Safety–Field Operations at Chick-Fil-A, to discuss the company’s work in digital solutions and innovation, antimicrobial resistance mitigation, food safety culture, and other areas.

With the post-pandemic ramp-up of in-person, global sporting events comes a parallel increase in the number of food safety professionals required to oversee the catering of such events. Event organizers and caterers alike have come to understand the importance of food safety in such large-scale scenarios.

Food business operators must ensure that their HACCP teams are motivated, dynamic, and knowledgeable, and that they correctly identify and outline all possible hazards for their product.

What does it take to have an extremely effective Food Safety and Quality Assurance (FSQA) technician team on the production floor? This article shares practiced perspective on "what it takes." Attributes for success are identified and explained. How they are integrated within a FSQA team on the floor will go a long way to galvanizing the success of that team. For food and beverage companies, "success" means effective risk identification and management, protection of public health, reduced costs of poor quality, and the manufacture and sale of high-quality food and beverage ingredients and products.

Ensuring that non-conforming product is never created—or at least never arrives at customers' doorsteps—is invaluable in the food industry. Reduced downgrade, less rework, and decreased out-of-specification product are all benefits of mistake proofing.

GS1 Connect 2023, the annual conference and exhibition hosted by GS1 US, will feature more than 275 industry-leading companies that will share strategies for leveraging GS1 Standards to enable end-to-end supply chain visibility.

To improve the food safety culture of an organization, it is critical that a key focus be the frontline employees. A proven tool to improve frontline employee engagement in effective food safety behaviors is the concept of "nudging"—a regular cadence of small, easily controlled, and easily taken actions to make a change process more effective, manageable, and sustainable. This article will showcase real-life examples of nudging and share successful examples.

The questions about the safety of controlled environment agriculture (CEA) are complicated. This article outlines why CEA safety depends on understanding and properly addressing the challenges of combining agricultural and ready-to-eat (RTE) into a single facility. It also addresses why CEA is not inherently safe. Ultimately, this article will show how the risk profile of CEA must be compared to that of other RTE produce and that there is no universal answer to the question of CEA safety.