New award will recognize food and beverage organizations applying innovative technology to strengthen food safety performance
FSTR is being launched in conjunction with its anchor research study: The Food Safety Digital Maturity Benchmark, giving food manufacturers an independent way to measure the impacts of digital transformation, technology adoption, and operational performance. The study findings will debut at the 15th Anniversary Food Safety Consortium Conference & Expo, October 21-23, in Washington DC.
The term, Normalization of Deviance has since become standard vocabulary in aviation safety, nuclear safety, and patient safety literature, precisely because the pattern keeps recurring: a known risk, documented, unresolved, tolerated because the bad outcome hasn’t happened yet… until the day it does.
Most food safety culture assessments still lean on annual surveys and self-reported audit responses — snapshots of what people say, taken once or twice a year. Supplier compliance behavior tells a more current story: how fast a vendor answers a document request, how often the same corrective action keeps coming back, and how long a supplier sits in an at-risk tier before anything changes. This article lays out a practical way to read that behavior as a culture signal, based on firsthand work redesigning a risk-tiered supplier verification system across a network of more than 1,000 suppliers.
Coast Citrus Distributors is voluntarily recalling fresh jalapeños due to potential Salmonella contamination, Taylor Fresh Foods is recalling finished products containing jalapeños subject to this recall according to a notification on FDA’s website.
The FDA is implementing a major reorganization plan called “Simple Reform” on October 1, 2026, which shifts field inspectors from specialized product roles back to generalist investigators and centralizes administrative functions. The food and beverage industry should expect a shift in audit dynamics, meaning audits will likely focus less on highly specific, niche technical processes and more on foundational, broad-spectrum quality systems. Dr. Stephen Ostroff and Frank Yiannas, both former Deputy Commissioners at FDA offer their opinions on Simple Reform.
The sample of lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms de Mexico produced a false postive test result.
New York City health officials traced a much smaller cyclosporiasis outbreak in April, one of multiple case clusters the city’s epidemiologists have pursued this year, led to cilantro.
Raw food safety data is most valuable when paired with actionable insights. By replacing manual workflows with automated software, food manufacturers can unlock real-time trend analysis and identify contamination hot spots before they spread.
Fifteen years of preventive controls investment has produced a record detailed enough to answer a question most operations confront only under pressure: not whether a system performs, but whether it can carry what growth asks of it. Rising volume, added complexity, new customers, and shifting requirements all impact the same structure, and they reveal whether the structure was built to absorb them, or whether people have been absorbing the difference on its behalf. This five-part series examines food safety through the business realities leaders already navigate: profitability, risk, growth, brand trust, and organizational function.
