Food Safety Top Stories

RSS

Reducing food waste is imperative for fighting world hunger, and technologies to reduce food waste can also help improve food safety, quality, and shelf life.

The culture of a facility in food safety or customer relations is impacted by how customer communications are managed. Customer complaint trending and response are part of a company or facility's risk management strategy. The objective of any management system is to try to protect the company from adverse actions. Understanding and responding to customer complaints is one strategy.

The authors and collaborating food safety experts have delineated several unique features in Australia around food safety and quality: intimate collaborations across sectors and functions, "walk the talk," and skills and capacity building.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, vendor certification has been top of mind for the food industry given the increased requirements and oversight of third-party audits and FDA regulations to better accommodate public health. This article will give a baseline understanding of the regulatory requirements between U.S. federal bodies (FDA, USDA) in comparison to widely known GFSI standards (BRC, SQF, FSSC 22200). Additionally, it will provide insight into key control areas for mitigating risk and adapting business in accordance with the growing emphasis on the importance of food safety culture.

Foreign material is an ongoing issue in food plants. The food safety foreign material plan must consider types of foreign materials, effectiveness of detection devices, and rapid screening of food safety device kick-outs. Tools to enhance investigation of these materials are equipment component mapping, defined burst limits, and protocols to restart the line.  

FDA Coordinated Outbreak Response and Evaluation Network (CORE), in collaboration with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and state and local public health and regulatory partners, conduct foodborne illness outbreak investigations, including those related to Cyclospora cayetanensis infections. In this article, the authors review the successes and challenges of identifying and responding to outbreaks caused by C. cayetanensis infections since 2013, the progress made, the challenges remaining, and what the future holds.

This article examines the food safety and nutrition risks and challenges of plant-based meat alternatives, including allergens, natural toxins, additives, microbial risks, and other issues.

Let's bust the myths that keep food safety and quality professionals from the success they deserve as they start a new job. Learn how onboarding makes sense from a financial perspective and a people perspective.

In our ongoing coverage of the supply chain crisis and how it is affecting food processors, Food Safety Insights surveyed more than 150 food processors in North America and around the world about how they are managing their recovery, the difficulties they are still coping with, what changes they have made and will be making in the future. Most processors told us that they continue to have some level of difficulty with high prices, availability of employees (including truck drivers), and supply shortages.  A large majority (about 75 percent) also tell us that they plan to implement changes and to manage their supply chains differently to avoid these issues in the future.

Efforts to reduce food waste may include the use of active and intelligent (A&I) packaging. Literature has pointed out the links between climate change, natural resource depletion, and food waste, and suggests that using A&I packaging to prolong product freshness and slow down spoilage of perishable fruit and meat has the diversion potential of 72,000 tons and an economic value of $167 million. As innovations in packaging advance, if allowed to do so, the impact of these products could be of greater benefit, not only in reducing food waste but also in improving food safety.