FSMA Fridays: FSMA & The Election Year: What Have We Seen So Far? (Part Three Of Three)

View the entire webcast or read Part One and Part Two of this series

In part two of FSMA Fridays: FSMA & The Election Year: What Have We Seen So Far? SafetyChain Software’s VP of Marketing, Jill Bender, discussed predictions related to food safety under the next presidential administration with The Acheson Group’s (TAG) Dr. David Acheson. Here, in the third, and final, portion of the series, the duo begins addressing questions from the webcast’s live audience.

Jill: One of the reasons we keep this advice going is all the people that join each and every month. We need to create that forum you were talking about, David, as far as sharing the experiences of when an FDA inspector is coming knocking, I think, and what we will all learn from that. I'll take that back as homework to find out the easiest and best ways, so that we can all glean insights from that.

With that, let's go ahead and open up a little bit of question and answer. We have Mike asking, and we touched on this, but it goes a little bit further, "With USDA and FSIS having trouble maintaining Inspection staff, where do you see problems arising with staffing the FDA and timelines for meeting inspection ability?"

David: Well, a common question that comes up with the agency talking about all this enforcement activity and do they have the budget to hire the people to do it, and as we've said in the past, and I think just the same now is, no, they don't. They really don't have a dramatically-increased budget to significantly increase inspectional capacity. I'm not personally aware that they're losing Inspectors any quicker than they ever did before and if somebody knows that that's a fact, which would be an interesting point to share. They've got a lot of listening to do with educating and training their people.