Food Safety Top Stories

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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.

Innovative packaging technologies that contribute to food safety include, but are not limited to, antimicrobial packaging, controlled-release packaging, nanotechnology, and biosensors. These technologies can aid in the control of not only spoilage microorganisms, which make the food product undesirable (but not necessarily unsafe), but also pathogenic organisms, which can cause illness and even death in humans. In the current economy, it may be difficult to make the decision to transition from a traditional packaging solution to an alternative; however, when product food safety is jeopardized and consumers are at potential risk, the food industry must do everything it can to prevent adverse scenarios.

In this article, the authors discuss the mechanisms by which food safety can be improved on the farm, along with some of the treatments that are effective today and likely will be available in the near future.

This article looks back at the events of the 1993 E. coli outbreak associated with hamburgers served at Jack in the Box restaurants along the U.S. West Coast, examining the regulatory changes inspired by the fatal outbreak and its impact. Also discussed are the corporate and industry changes, spearheaded by Dr. David Theno, that set new standards for leadership and management in foodservice and food safety.