Food Safety Top Stories

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It can be challenging to maintain good working relationships with federal regulators when things are going well, but how do you leverage your best efforts during an inspection/audit especially when there are issues? Let's address how handling the inspection itself can be your most important asset, along with a fundamental understanding of the science and regulations that are in play.

Food companies need to embrace a change in their culture to one of collaboration with their internal colleagues and their equipment and infrastructure supply chain. Public health can only be maintained with safe food, and a culture of hygienic design helps deliver it in a responsible way.  

To improve food safety and reduce the risk of foodborne illness related to meal kits, it is important to evaluate operations with a farm-to-fork lens, ensuring not just the safety of the meal kit itself but also promoting proper handling and preparation by the customer.

Many food companies have made commitments to increase the use of recycled plastics in their packaging within the next 10 years. As this demand increases, there is more interest in chemical recycling, but first, we must understand current reprocessing capabilities and possible safety issues with the use of chemical recycled plastics in food packaging.

The launch of this meat research and discovery program will drive innovations beyond conventional meat processing and will streamline the tracking of foodborne pathogens throughout the meat production chain and evaluations of the efficacy of intervention measures.

Implementation of rapid whole-genome sequencing could help transform microbial risk surveillance across the food industry from a surveillance approach to a more preventive approach; one in which we can identify outbreak indicators to predict, and take steps to prevent, a problem before it even occurs.

While the fatal poisoning of more than 100 people with sulfanilamide sweetened with diethylene glycol occurred nearly 85 years ago, the herculean mobilization of federal, state, and local inspectors to retrieve product and prevent more deaths is as vital a lesson today as it was then.

Foreign bodies are a large risk to the food and drink industry with authorities recalling products due to foreign-body contamination. Learn how a strong food safety culture can help a company implement best practices in avoiding such events.

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.  

The harmonization of food legislation helps ensure the availability of safe and quality food using widely accepted standards that facilitate the movement of food between countries without arbitrary legal constraints or unjustifiably inequities.