FSQA enabling technologies can have a great impact on transforming and harmonizing food safety and quality assurance, mitigating risk and improving ability to meet operational KPIs, says SafetyChain Software’s Barbara Levin.
Lawmakers Introduce Bill for Single “Food Safety Administration”
Food safety oversight is currently split up among 15 agencies in the Departments of Health and Human Services, Agriculture, and Commerce. The Safe Food Act of 2015 introduced in both houses of Congress on Wednesday, aims to consolidate all the authorities for food safety inspections, enforcement and labeling into the Food Safety Administration.
One of the important efforts we all have in common in this industry is that we must continually identify food safety risk (or gaps) in food manufacturing, distribution, and sales to develop improved systems, methods, chemicals, and tools to fill these gaps and reduce risk. Many of these efforts will become mandatory due to the new regulatory rules being developed through FSMA.
The year 2015 will see more changes announced with the various FSMA rules as they are being finalized. What can you do now to prepare?
Produce safety featured prominently in the recently concluded Food Safety Consortium in Chicago November 17-18, 2014 for two reasons: First, produce remains the largest source of foodborne illness outbreaks in the United States, and second, the recent supplemental notice by FDA calling for another round of public comments on the proposed rule for “ Standards for the Growing, Harvesting, Packing, and Holding of Produce for Human Consumption .”
Roberta Wagner, Director, Office of Compliance at CFSAN, talks about how FDA will determine if a facility is high-risk or non high-risk, and how the agency will handle foreign facility inspections under FSMA.
Prof. P C Vasavada provides a preview of his upcoming presentation at the Food Safety Consortium, in which he will speak about food safety testing trends, and discuss approaches for testing of food and food plant environment, emphasizing microbial and other significant food hazards.
The Foreign Supplier Verification Program has seen some changes in the re-proposals. In addition to closer alignment with the Preventive Controls Rules, several other changes have been proposed. Two subject matter experts discuss these changes, and their impact on U.S. importers.
“Food defense is different from preventive controls and food defense cannot be prescriptive—it needs to be tied to a facility-specific risk evaluation,” says Shannon Cooksey, Senior Director at the Grocery Manufacturers Association.
Did FDA reinvent the wheel with FSMA, given GFSI? If you are GFSI certified, do you comply with all FSMA rules or what additional rules do you have to comply with? Will FDA accept GFSI certification in lieu of an inspection? Read for answers.
