FSMA Fridays: Listeria - The Conversation Continues (Part Three Of Four)

View the entire webcast or read part one and part two of the series

In part two of FSMA Fridays: Listeria - The Conversation Continues, SafetyChain Software’s VP of Marketing, Jill Bender was joined by The Acheson Group’s (TAG) VP of Scientific Affairs Dr. Peyman Fatemi and TAG’s Senior Director of Food Safety Randy Porter to discuss listeria control under the FDA. Here, in part three, the trio continues addressing the food industry’s questions on the FDA’s guidance on listeria.

Jill: It's interesting when we talk about clean in in place (CIP), the part about having that data, that analytics is really important, I would assume as far as the cadence of numbers that are coming in.

We're going to go ahead and move on to the next questions here. Randy I'm going to ask you go ahead and address it. The question was, “Let's say I follow the FDA's recommendation to test raw materials for Listeria ... Do my test results impact other food manufacturers that received the same lots of raw materials?”

Randy: This is a question that industry has struggled with to some extent over many, many years, at least that I've been in industry. So, the guidance document really talks to understanding your suppliers and vetting your suppliers so that you have a written program to make sure that you know what the suppliers are doing and how they're controlling risk, how they're controlling Listeria. The testing piece of that is recommended, but that's an over-check system if you really understand your supplier and know their managing that risk. So that, I believe, is really more checking that your supplier controls are adequate.

But, I think what's more appropriate, is doing some over checking, doing some testing, and just verifying that the COA that you received is accurate, verifying that there are no issues. Always remember that testing is not 100 percent, this depends on where that sample came from as to whether you'll find contamination or not. So that's one of the negatives to testing, however it is a good additional verification step.