Food Safety Top Stories

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Do engaged, informed, and empowered sanitation teams act as a predictor of success for an integrated pest management (IPM) program? With excellent food safety risk management behaviors, a frontline sanitation team can help manage existing risks and identify new ones, dramatically reducing the potential of product contamination due to pest activity in a facility. This article describes an action plan to help achieve these goals. 

In defending food safety procedures and practices to an inspector who is challenging them, it is best to have multiple sequential "rings of defense." This means that the easiest changes are suggested first, with more costly and difficult changes suggested later. Doing this strategically has the advantage of minimizing changes to the procedures and practices, and potentially avoiding a costly recall or market withdrawal.

In the ever-evolving world of the food industry, ethics play a pivotal role in safeguarding consumers and upholding the integrity of businesses. This article aims to provide readers with a profound understanding of ethics in the food industry and how they intertwine with food safety culture. Thought-provoking stories highlight the importance of formal food ethics and their role in decision-making. As consumers, employees, or stakeholders, we all play a part in shaping a more ethically responsible food industry, where safety and trust are paramount.

Information sharing is an important function for a Food and Agriculture Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FA-ISAC), which links business and government through "active collaboration,"  thereby strengthening the ability of the food and agriculture industries to withstand challenges and threats.

A lack of supply chain visibility frustrates efforts to ensure food safety or improve organizational efficiency and customer satisfaction. Key data points, such as unique product identification and location, need to be standardized and digitally encoded so that they can be automatically captured and shared up and down the supply chain, to help ensure interoperability.

The updated Food Safety Preventive Controls Alliance (FSPCA) Preventive Controls for Human Food curriculum provides small and midsized companies a better understanding of how to develop a food safety plan through the use of examples for implementation, with a clear demonstration that the Preventive Controls regulation is a HACCP-based system.

The establishment of a comprehensive surveillance program that harnesses the benefits of whole genome sequencing (WGS) requires a coordinated approach involving multiple stakeholders at multiple levels within the framework of One Health. EFSA is actively collaborating with the network of EU experts to foster cooperation and promote equitable data-sharing practices, and is also committed to ensuring a more balanced contribution from all European countries and providing effective support and resources when necessary.

Data have allowed the pork industry to understand risk points in slaughter and processing, as well as the highest-risk products and how Salmonella changes throughout the process. The collective goal is to promote universal food safety knowledge, improve human health, and, thus, contribute to USDA's ambitious target of achieving a 25 percent reduction in salmonellosis cases by 2030.

In this Food Safety Insights column, we continue to explore processors' near-term priorities for food safety programs, as well as the regulations and issues they are watching that will have the most impact on their programs in the future. Food safety culture, microbiological control (including environmental monitoring), and sanitation and hygiene are three of processors' indicated top priorities for the near term.

Consumers desire safe, high-quality eggs that meet expectations of cleanliness, taste, appearance, and function. Egg handling and storage plays an integral role in meeting these consumer demands.