Food Safety Top Stories

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To prevent Clostridium botulinum poisoning, hygienic processing, especially during the heating and sterilization steps, must be maintained.

Recent flooding in California included many ranches in the Salinas Valley, which grow leafy greens and other crops. Floodwaters have the potential to contain various pathogens that can directly cross-contaminate future product grown in those fields, as well as nearby fields. Bringing land back into production is an area of great concern.

Senior executives from Wawa Inc., Maple Leaf Foods, OSI Group, and Cultivate SA will discuss risk culture at the Food Safety Summit keynote on May 10 in Rosemont, Illinois.

Flour mills produce a "ready-to-cook" product. The most severe food safety hazards at flour mills are physical and include metal, wood, pests, and other items. A variety of equipment is used in an enclosed system to prevent physical and other contamination of the product.

Edible insects are still considered a "new" food product in the commercial food industry, and it is important to understand the unique food safety challenges they may pose, which could be biological, chemical, or allergenic in nature.

Proving food safety is a monumental challenge, if not an impossibility. However, with the appropriate tools and techniques one can confirm, with a high degree of statistical confidence, the effectiveness of a preventive control for reducing a specified hazard to an acceptable level or concentration that is consistent with achieving public health objectives.  

Risk-based approaches for food allergens offer a path forward for both allergen management and precautionary allergen labeling decision-making. After many years of research, a clearer picture has emerged of the population-level, threshold-dose distributions for major food allergens using data generated in double-blind, placebo-controlled food challenge studies. If the food allergen management field is headed for a shift toward quantitative, risk-based management strategies, however, then several method considerations and important data gaps must be addressed.

In November, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released its new Food Traceability Rule. The rule will apply to companies that manufacture, process, pack, or hold food on FDA's Food Traceability List (FTL), but the rule will have a wide-reaching impact on processors and suppliers that work with other foods, too. We surveyed and interviewed food processors in the U.S./Canada and around the world to get their thoughts on this new rule and how it will impact their businesses.

Prevention is a key focus in alleviating food fraud. In the food supply chain specifically, the lack of understanding and awareness regarding food fraud facilitators provides numerous opportunities for fraudsters to engage in criminal behavior. This article introduces the problem of food document fraud and the role documents play in facilitating food fraud events. Topics covered include crime prevention theory, food fraud prevention, food fraud facilitators, types and classifications of documents targeted in fraud, a food document fraud survey, and how food document fraud fits into a food fraud vulnerability assessment.

This article presents the key findings of outbreak investigations from 2014–2021 that have been linked to the consumption of fresh, soft queso fresco-type cheeses in the U.S. The authors outline some of the specific circumstances that small manufacturers of all cheeses may encounter in an effort to provide lessons learned and highlight available resources.