On Tuesday, May 23, the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) partnered with Food Online for a live web chat, Food For Thought: FSMA’s Food Defense Rule. In this 45-minute live Q&A, Warren Stone, senior director of science policy, compliance, and inspection at GMA, and Clay Detlefsen, VP of regulatory affairs and counsel at NMPF joined Food Online’s editor, Sam Lewis, to answer the food industry’s questions on the topic, including why HACCP isn't enough to ensure you comply with FSMA's Food Defense Rule.
Founded in 1948, Green Valley Pecan Company has grown to encompass 10,000 acres with year-round processing facilities. The company was faced with the challenge of preventing the natural knowledge loss that occurs between trainings while simultaneously boosting knowledge retention without increasing training time. This case study details the solution, systems, and tools the company implemented to achieve its goals, as well as their corresponding improvement metrics.
Contract food testing laboratories have experienced a 9.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the past five years, reaching $3.4B in 2013. One food contract testing laboratory was experiencing this rapid growth in pathogen testing volume first hand. This case study explores how the contract testing laboratory was able to grow its pathogen testing business within an existing footprint, with no additional resources, and provide a higher quality results to its clients.
Bigelow Tea has been making specialty teas for over seventy years. The company grows, blends, and packages hundreds of varieties of tea for distribution across the nation. Today, the company boasts the only U.S.-based industrial tea plantation, as well as three packaging sites that employ hundreds of workers. Because of the company’s size, it needed a consistent training program across all its location. This case study examines how interactive classroom training, course customization, and multilingual content helped Bigelow Tea create a companywide, consistent training program.
Bonduelle’s 500 vegetable varieties are processed at 58 facilities by over 10,000 workers. Safety is top of mind for the company, and with so many facilities and employees, creating a companywide culture of food safety is essential. This case study shows how Bonduelle used front-line workforce training, verification training, and automated recordkeeping and reporting to achieve its desired food safety goals.
Kisko Products, Canada's largest producer of freeze pops, needed a way to ensure safe and productive operations to maintain customer satisfaction. This case study shows how the company implemented standardized training and real-time reporting to improve it production efficiency and maintain customer satisfaction.
Since 1946, WW Johnson Meat Company has produced premium, quality ground beef distributed to retail and food service operations across the Midwest and beyond. As the company’s workforce continued to diversify, it needed a way to break the language barrier between employees and trainers and verify that employees understood training concepts. This case study shows how WW Johnson Meat implemented consistent, multilingual content and automated recordkeeping to overcome barriers of learning.
The health and safety of your food is important, but you should also be concerned with your food quality. If one low-quality food item makes it to a first-time customer, even if it’s an outlier rather than the norm, it could completely jeopardize your relationship with that customer forever. No restaurant or food manufacturer is perfect; there are going to be errors and random occurrences that compromise the quality of your food in one dimension or another. The way to fight back against them is through auditing, which allows you to evaluate your approach, gauge the quality of your food and make any corrections necessary before your customers are affected. So what kind of “quality audits” are we talking about?
Preventing physical hazards in food continues to be challenging, and frequently, the reason for companies and/or regulatory agencies issuing recall notices. A brief review of the recalls viewable online at Recall.gov indicates that the number of recalls for physical hazards per month ranges from zero to eight involving USDA and FDA amenable products. Wood, plastic, glass, rubber, glass, and stones have been found in food products as evidenced by the various recalls over time. Recently, many reported recalls involve various types of plastic. The amount of food products recalled could encompass millions of pounds and put numerous consumers of all ages at risk.
Life in a food manufacturing plant can be hectic and unpredictable, to say the least. On the positive side – no two days are ever the same. On the not so positive side – YIKES – keeping track of all that needs to be done while working through ‘challenges and opportunities’ is more turbulent than hurricane force winds! To keep your head on straight, your training programs should be the first thing pulled out of the tool kit when dealing with a change or issue. So how do you create an agile and strategic program?
For years, there has been a buzz about how genome sequencing is revolutionizing food safety. It is definitely an incredible tool giving an immediate understanding of the genetic composition of microbial pathogens, including bacteria and viruses. However, there are still gaps needing filled regarding how pathogens produce disease and survive in foods. Genome sequencing brings us more tools to further characterize pathogens, but do not expect any other parts of food safety to be forgotten soon because of WGS.
There are many aspects of resource allocation to consider when developing a food safety management system (FSMS) for a business and there are efficiencies to be gained in almost every area of an FSMS. Technology and software can provide your team with the tools to monitor production targets and deviations in real-time and more efficiently than visual inspection.
Once harvested, produce and fruits often comingle at packing and processing plants, which can complicate the contamination potential, not to mention other factors such as workers and handling, which can lead to other foodborne pathogen introduction. Industry, researchers, and trade groups are constantly innovating to develop good agriculture practices (GAPs) and means to control/minimize the risk associated with potential contamination. But, can pathogens be completely eliminated from fresh produce?
A rapid, accurate, and reliable molecular test for STEC detection from a variety of food samples.
Food Safety in the Ready to Eat Market has become more complex. Not only is it more important than ever to control the processing environment, controlling the ingredient supply chain is paramount to ensuring your brand and more importantly ensuring your customers and brand are protected.
Globalization, regulatory pressures, and a shift in product complexity has driven rapid, profound change within the dairy industry. These changes require new solutions to ensure brand protection, product safety, and risk management. Previous, more dated technology cannot keep pace with this evolution and has created unneeded inefficiencies in the supply chain process. Roka Bioscience is the only technology that can deliver better process control and an automated solution that can more rapidly deliver high quality results and ensure a more efficient manufacturing, reduced refrigeration, and on-time delivery process.
Today's poultry supply chain is more complex, with stricter regulation than ever before. Maintaining high resolution to the manufacturing environment and subsequent interventions is paramount in meeting the new performance standards. Roka Bioscience and the Atlas Platform can offer a prevalence testing solution in addition to the Limits Testing application that provides the poultry industry solutions from grow houses through the storage of finished product. The Atlas System gives a rapid, semi-quantitative picture of the environment enabling better, more efficient, and more effective intervention strategies
The ingredients and flavorings market represents a key link in the supply chain in ensuring safety in the final product. Recent recalls have highlighted the need for improved control to minimize this vast impact and a better understanding of the results behind a COA.
Are you confident your front-line workforce is adhering to best practices that keep your food safe for consumers?
A new rapid yeast and mold test method for dairy applications, such as yogurt, soft cheese and cream, can dramatically improve speed-to-market and reduce economic impact from spoiled product.
A rapid, accurate, and reliable molecular assay for detecting Listeria species in food and environmental samples.
In this web chat, Jennifer McEntire, VP food safety & technology at United Fresh Produce Association joins Kristen Spotz, senior manager of food safety & quality assurance at GMA to talk all things traceability related to the food industry. In addition to providing leading traceability practices, the 45-minute session focuses heavily on McEntire and Spotz answering questions from the web chat’s audience.
The Atlas System is a fully automated molecular instrument that enhances the accuracy, speed, and efficiency of food safety testing through detection of molecular pathogens, including Listeria, Salmonella, Escherichia coli, and other organisms commonly implicated in food contamination episodes.
Pathogen testing is often outsourced to third-party lab providers. When choosing the best lab for your company, it is important to ask the right questions to ensure the test method aligns with the quality goals of the organization. This video provides guidance and offers suggestions to help you determine the best lab for you company’s pathogen detection needs.
