In this episode of Food Safety Matters, we interview Conrad Choiniere, Ph.D., Director of the Office of Analytics and Outreach at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN), about his work leading FDA's Toxic Elements Working Group, as well as the agency’s efforts and considerations related to the Closer to Zero initiative, which aims to reduce the health risks posed by toxic elements in the U.S. baby food supply. We also review the results of FDA's Total Diet Study (TDS) related to toxic elements in baby food samples.
Additionally, we spoke to Kruti Ravaliya, M.S., Consumer Safety Officer in the Division of Produce Safety at FDA's CFSAN, about how FDA intends to implement Subpart E of the Produce Safety Rule—the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) Proposed Rule on Agricultural Water—including the recently extended compliance dates for pre-harvest agricultural water requirements. Finally, Bob Ferguson, President of Strategic Consulting Inc., speaks about his latest Food Safety Insights column on the projects and priorities that food processors put on hold during the pandemic and are now revisiting.
The Northeast Center to Advance Food Safety has published the Processors’ Food Safety Toolkit, a webpage designed for small and very small food processors that are required to comply with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Preventive Controls for Human Food Rule under the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA).
On Monday afternoon at the 2022 International Association for Food Protection (IAFP) Annual Meeting, representatives from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA’s FSIS) provided U.S. regulatory updates on food safety.
Assuring food safety in this "New Era of Smarter Food Safety" and with the increasing use of whole genome sequencing provides many new challenges for food safety professionals. While these challenges are many and multi-faceted, it is helpful to look back to the "old" era of food safety, to some of the foundational concepts in the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act that are still in force today. In this article, the authors focus first on one of many important legal terms that is extremely important and often misunderstood: adulteration.
FDA has announced the fiscal year 2023 (FY 2023) user fee rates for the Voluntary Qualified Importer Program and the Accredited Third-Party Certification Program.
The Association of Food and Drug Officials (AFDO) published a guidance that clarifies the differences between mandatory requirements of the Produce Safety Rule (PSR) and multiple U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Good Agricultural Practice (GAP) audits.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has answered frequently asked questions (FAQs) about the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) final rule on the Laboratory Accreditation for Analyses of Foods (LAAF).
In our last column, we revisited some of the testing-related topics we have covered since the inception of Food Safety Insights. This article looks at a few of the other subjects that have made an impact on our markets in these past 5 years.
Considerations for how ingredients will be sourced, inspected, segregated, and processed may impact the quality and safety of the finished product. It is important for food product developers to consult not only their procurement partners but also their food safety and quality partners to use ingredients from reliable and trustworthy suppliers from the beginning.