FSMA Fridays — What's Ahead In 2017? (Part Three Of Four)

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

In part two of FSMA Fridays — What's Ahead In 2017? SafetyChain Software’s VP of Marketing, Jill Bender is joined by The Acheson Group’s (TAG) President and CEO Dr. David Acheson to discuss what 2017 will bring the F&B industry in regards to the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). Here, in part three, the duo continues their conversation and begins handling questions from webcast’s live audience.

Jill: We’ve had an open dialog about what we're going to look towards and making that easier. Again, you've kind of gone through this, but we've talked about what do we see now from the FDA and the trend continue into 2017. Do you have any further thoughts on that?

David: Yeah, I got into this a little ahead of schedule, but the environment, the whole genome sequence thing, and absolutely, and without repeating it, that’s exactly where I see it going. This is because the CDC is pushing it, the FDA is pushing it, and increasingly FSIS is pushing it. That's where I see this going, first and foremost. That's what I'm most concerned about for food companies.

And that fits into something we're going to talk about in just a second, “What should food companies worry about?” To my way of thinking, it's exactly that. I'm not trying to make this an environmental monitoring program session, but it's amazing how often that is coming up. We're seeing this and the use of whole genome sequencing and finding an isolate and regulators not quite jumping to conclusions but definitely taking pretty significant actions in terms of where they're going.