FSMA Fridays: Food Safety Plans — HACCP To HARPC (Part Three Of Four)

View The Entire Webinar or check out Part One and Part Two of this series

In Part Two of FSMA Fridays: Food Safety Plans — HACCP To HARPC, SafetyChain’s Jill Bender was joined by The Acheson Group’s Dr. David Acheson and Dr. Peyman Fatemi to offer insight on the migration from a HACCP-based approach to food safety to HARPC. Here, in part three of the series, the trio will begin detailing what the FDA expects regarding compliance to a HARPC-based food safety plan and when the agency will begin expecting it.

Jill: Let’s go ahead and move on to a little bit of a different topic here, but definitely on everyone’s mind in the idea of compliance and when it’s coming to you. David, why don’t you share with us what the FDA is expecting?

David: Oh, yes isn’t that the million, or billion-dollar question? You know as we were talking, Jill, in talk of FSMA updates, we don’t have compliance documents, I wouldn’t say we are in the dark, but I wouldn’t say we have bright lights illuminating in the path forward here in terms of what the FDA is expecting. Let me caveat my thoughts on this one with a little bit of just instinctive response as opposed to factual.

I think everything I have heard from the FDA, officially and unofficially, online and offline, is they know there are a lot of people figuring out how to move forward with FSMA compliance. I think that they recognize there are a lot of companies that are not there yet, they recognize that there is still a lot of work to do. I believe that, and maybe this is wishful thinking on my park, and it’s more I hope than I believe, that they are going to anticipate facilities will not have a completely buttoned-up food safety plan by September 17. The key point here is then, “What is the expectation? What do they expect us to have in place by then?”