Frank Meek, Orkin

Common Pest Control Misconceptions and Myths for Food Processing Facilities

By Frank Meek
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Frank Meek, Orkin

Guarding the integrity of food processing facilities against pests is a mission-critical endeavor, and misinformation surrounding pest control can lead to costly mistakes, regulatory troubles and even potential health risks.

To ensure a safe and pest-free environment for food production, it’s essential to debunk these common misconceptions:

Pest control for my facility is just spraying pesticides, fogging and placing traps. Pest control plans are unique and specifically created to best fit the needs of the individual facility. Years of scientific research on pests’ behavior and trends by Pest Management Professionals (PMPs), university and industry entomologists, as well as product manufacturers go into the curation of such customized plans. Strategies for pest management are wide-ranging, highly individualized and constantly evolving through ongoing monitoring and maintenance.

Pest infestations do not affect other industries. Without sufficient pest control, many industries would be threatened. The pest control industry plays a vital role in the success of public health, structures and property, animal health and supporting the economy.

Pest control in my facility is the responsibility of my pest control provider. Pest control is an all-hands-on-deck responsibility that requires active participation from facility managers, employees, vendors and customers. To assist in helping keep pests out of your facility, be sure to:

  • Inspect all deliveries to your facility to make sure there are no signs of pest activity including droppings, holes in packaging or bugs stuck in packaging tape. If evidence of pest activity is found in a delivery truck or shipment, isolate the truck and refuse delivery of the contaminated shipment.
  • Avoid creating openings in your facility’s structure that may allow for easy access from pests. Seal cracks in walls and windows, add door sweeps and replace broken ventilation covers and installation weatherstripping that is no longer effective.
  • When it comes to pests, early detection—which often comes from your staff—is the best way to avoid a larger, time-consuming and costly infestation problem. Many pest control providers provide complimentary staff training to explain the signs of pest trouble and where one might look to find them.
  • Create and follow vacuuming schedules, sanitation plans and exclusion methods. Make sure to connect with your provider regarding best practices.

Common Pest Control Myths

Aside from pest control misconceptions in food manufacturing specifically, there are several myths to keep in mind when evaluating your pest control options. They include:

For more information, view our on demand webinar, “Top Misconceptions About Pest Control”

Electronic Fly Killer (EEK) devices are illegal. These devices are legal, but restrictions exist around where they can be used within the facility.

An Integrated Pest Management (IPM) approach is the same as “green” pest control. An IPM approach allows pest control providers to look at facilities holistically to determine the most beneficial plan possible. IPM can be more ecofriendly but can also use more specialized treatments depending on the provider and recommendation.

Fogging must be done routinely to control pests. Fogging is not a technique that needs to be completed many times. If pest issues persist, there are several other strategies a pest control provider could recommend within an IPM program that may not be as invasive.

Total release foggers are the same as fumigating. Fogging and fumigation are distinct forms of pest control using different chemicals and processes. Fumigation is much more invasive but may be recommended depending on the circumstance.

A paper logbook is better than a digital one. While both forms of logging can capture accurate information for your pest control provider, digital logs are much less likely to be damaged. Depending on the facility and provider’s preferences, both forms of logging are effective.

It’s the weapon and not the warrior that fixes pest issues. Without sufficient training of pest control professionals, no tool will be as effective as it could be. Using IPM, providers can better diagnose situations and act accordingly.

There is no innovation in the pest control industry. Pest control is always growing and evolving to create the best and least invasive options for your facility. Innovation is a key pillar of the pest control industry, backed by leading entomologists who study pest behavior and best practices.

What Pest Control Is

Now that you understand some of the common misconceptions and myths of pest control, it is important to establish the fundamental details of pest control and its possibilities for your facility.

IPM is an all-inclusive, ongoing and proactive cycle focused on prevention for your facility. After a thorough inspection, providers will implement the most effective customized pest control measures to benefit the needs of the facility. Providers then continue to monitor the program’s effectiveness and perform check-ins as needed to ensure the facility is cared for.

A successful IPM program:

  • Is environmentally conscious and intentional in its measures.
  • Involves the entire staff in the operation.
  • Keeps detailed records of all pest activity and pest control operations.
  • Educates and partners with facility managers to understand the business operations comprehensively.
  • Addresses pest hot spots inside and outside the facility.
  • Inspects the property and focuses on exclusion techniques that help keep pests out of the building.

For the optimal partnership with your pest control provider, always provide documentation of pest sightings and spotting trends in your facility. Implementing a process for staff to report any signs of pest activity can help keep employees aware. Always maintain open lines of communication with your pest control provider and communicate the importance of preventative measures internally.

Navigating pest control in your food processing facility requires dispelling of common misconceptions and myths to help develop the best possible treatment plan for your facility. By fostering an environment of open communication and trust, you can help safeguard your facility, protect your customers and employees, and preserve your business’s reputation and success.

 

 

Emily Newton, Revolutionized Magazine

6 Ways IoT Asset Tracking Ensures Safe Distribution and Better Traceability

By Emily Newton
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Emily Newton, Revolutionized Magazine

Internet of Things (IoT) sensors are being used in industries across the spectrum, and their potential is far from being realized. The data provided via IoT asset tracking technologies, in particular, can enhance traceability and product integrity, leading to safer food and reducing costly losses. Following are six ways IoT tracking sensors support food safety, traceability and accountability.

Vendor Compliance

Adulteration occurs more often in the supply chain than any professional cares to admit. Some experts estimate it has a $50 billion annual impact on the food industry. Whether motivated by financial gain or product shortages, opportunistic intermediaries will take advantage of poor food traceability and make substitutions, dilutions or falsifications.

To prevent bringing adulterated products to market and keep consumers safe, manufacturers must hold their third-party vendors accountable at every stage of the distribution process, and IoT asset tracking sensors can help. They have the ability to record shipment movements in real time, so companies can ensure that their products and raw materials arrive and remain in the right places at each step in the chain.

Further, manufacturers can reduce the chances of product tampering by using IoT sensors that alert you when someone damages packaging. Bad actors are much less likely to commit food fraud when they know highly sophisticated technology is monitoring their actions and movements.

Damage Detection

Food products, especially those in the cold chain, can bruise, break and flatten relatively quickly, causing financial losses. For instance, grain loses significant value when damaged due to improper handling. Through a combination of IoT sensors and sensing nodes that can track the condition of products and provide relevant, real-time updates, companies can ensure their shipments stay intact throughout distribution and transportation.

Theft Reduction

Cargo theft is a significant problem that’s relatively new to the food industry. According to the FBI, it costs supply chain vendors and retailers up to $30 billion annually. While thieves have historically targeted electronics or high-cost imports, food inflation is making food products a top target as of 2023.

Industrial IoT sensors improve food traceability by tracking a shipment’s movement through the supply chain. They can provide real-time location data or update food-manufacturing professionals when the product reaches a particular destination. Companies can use this data to pinpoint sources of cargo theft, delays or mishandling, increasing product safety and reducing loss.

Spoilage Detection

Spoilage claims 33% of food products manufacturers produce, resulting in over $1 trillion in losses annually. This figure probably isn’t surprising for professionals working in the cold chain, as transportation condition management is incredibly complex and expensive.

Even if food appears fine for human consumption, undetected issues can be catastrophic down the line. A single recall costs a food company over $10 million on average, not accounting for lost sales or reputational damage.

With IoT asset tracking, industry professionals can monitor temperature, humidity and chemical compounds to improve the integrity of their products and ensure safe distribution. They can place sensors inside their vehicles or in packaging to monitor all changes.

Since these sensors provide a complete temperature and humidity account, professionals can even collect data for future use to forecast potential losses when conditions become abnormal. This allows companies to take action quickly to prevent spoilage, dramatically reducing the chances of a recall.

Enhanced Data Collection

An IoT sensor utilizing radio frequency identification (RFID) can collect a massive amount of data on distribution and transportation conditions that industry professionals can gather and store for future use. This information provides insights into route optimization and/or sources of contamination. With the addition of artificial intelligence, these sensors can maximize food traceability by validating everything passing through a gate.

If retailers wish to make some of this information available to end users, they can publish it or use specialized barcodes. Customers will get to review the origin of the raw materials and products, providing increased awareness of where their food comes from and the path it took to get to their store.

Faster Traceability

One in six people every year become sick due to a foodborne illness. It is up to manufacturers, distributors and retailers to ensure product quality and prevent these illnesses. When outbreaks do occur, it is up to manufacturers—both morally and legally—to trace that product and remove it before others are affected.

Luckily, IoT devices meet all the necessary regulatory criteria. RFID and other technologies can trace products in real time and alert the relevant parties of any significant changes. For example, they could track a perishable produce shipment and notify retailers and manufacturers of an extreme temperature spike.

Since these sensors can send out instantaneous alerts, nearby professionals can immediately respond before product becomes contaminated or spoils. Whether they are alerted to temperature fluctuations, suspected tampering or imminent spoilage, they can move quickly to address the concern.

IoT asset tracking is an innovative approach to common industry pain points. It addresses the food sector’s unique needs, taking perishables, food compliance and adulteration into account. With such significant food traceability improvements, manufacturers, distributors and retailers will have a much easier time coordinating their operations to increase safety, speed to market and the quality of their products.

Emily Newton, Revolutionized Magazine

How Collaborative Robots Can Increase Food Production Capacity

By Emily Newton
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Emily Newton, Revolutionized Magazine

As the population grows, food production capacity must likewise increase. While that’s generally good news for food manufacturers, scaling can be complex, especially amid widespread inefficiencies and labor challenges. Implementing collaborative robots in manufacturing can help overcome those obstacles.

Collaborative robots—also called cobots—work alongside human workers instead of in fully automated workflows or behind machine guarding. If food manufacturers can implement them effectively, this robot-human collaboration can make it easier to increase production capacity in the following ways.

1. Speeding Warehouse Operations

Warehouse operations are common bottlenecks, and as online food and direct-to-consumer services grow, they’ll become increasingly crucial. One of the most impactful ways cobots increase capacity in manufacturing is by making warehouses more efficient.

Cobots are especially helpful in picking. Walking accounts for most of the picking time, and it’s easy for humans to make errors in these workflows. Consequently, using cobots to manage picking while humans handle other tasks increases warehouse productivity two times over on average.

When cobots handle the most time-consuming tasks, warehouses can move more product in less time. As a result, these facilities manage rising throughput without significant delays, enabling faster growth without sacrificing shipping times or costs.

2. Mitigating Labor Shortages

Similarly, cobots can address labor shortages that currently stop food manufacturers from reaching peak capacity. Many professionals worry about the impact of robotics on jobs, but cobots augment human labor, not replace it. In addition, employees today are leaving the workforce faster than employers can replace them, so businesses need solutions apart from human workers.

Collaborative robots help by automating the facility’s most mundane or time-consuming tasks, which leaves human employees with more time to spend on other work. The factory as a whole can accomplish more as a result.

3. Minimizing Errors

In addition to excelling at repetitive tasks, collaborative robots can also handle the most error-prone tasks. Monotonous workflows—such as packaging, labeling and picking—are common in food production and not ideal for humans, who get tired and distracted easily. Using cobots in these roles instead can minimize mistakes. Fewer mistakes translate into less disruption to the workflow and fewer wasted materials. This, in turn, increases throughput, making upscaling more cost effective.

4. Improving Safety

Like conventional industrial robots, cobots can automate the most hazardous tasks in a facility to minimize injuries. Unlike traditional robots, cobots can work safely alongside humans without additional safety stops. Consequently, they minimize machine-related accidents, offering more safety than other automation systems. Food manufacturing plants will have less unplanned downtime due to workplace accidents. With more uptime, they can increase production capacity.

Automating parts of the workflow also creates more production data to analyze. Increased connectivity and data have helped manufacturers respond to foodborne illness outbreaks faster, improving the safety of consumers, as well.

5. Enabling Flexibility

Conventional robots can produce similar benefits in many of these areas but they come at the cost of flexibility. Using collaborative robots in manufacturing lets food producers enjoy the advantages of automation without sacrificing adaptability.

Fully automated workflows can take days or even weeks to adjust to new processes. Collaborative workflows can adapt much more quickly because human workers are more flexible than machines. Cobots let food manufacturers capitalize on automation’s efficiency and human adaptability, providing the best of both worlds.

That flexibility is essential when upscaling because increasing capacity will disrupt some workflows. Facilities will have to adapt as demands rise and shift, and conventional automation is too rigid to make that transition smoothly and quickly. Collaborative robots are a more reliable way forward in a disruption-prone market.

Historically, food production has not been able to automate to the same extent as other manufacturing sectors. Workflows involve too much variability to meet the sudden shifts in consumer demands. Cobots offer the flexibility and speed companies need to embrace automation.

As more food manufacturers implement cobots, it is likely that the nation’s food production capacity will grow. That growth is an essential step forward as the population rises and direct-to-consumer food shipping becomes more popular.

Store meat

Consumer Perception of Smart Sensors in Meat Packaging

By Food Safety Tech Staff
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Store meat

A majority of consumers are interested in purchasing meat products that include biosensors that monitor pathogens, but their willingness to pay more for the intelligent packaging is dependent upon the perceived risk of foodborne illness, according to a recent study published in the International Journal of Consumer Studies.

For “The use of smart biosensors during a food safety incident: Consumers’ cognitive-behavioural responses and willingness to pay,” authors Giuseppe Nocella, et al, surveyed consumers using the protection motivation theory (PMT) to explore responses to risk communication in the absence and presence of a food safety incident. The surveys also gauged respondents’ willingness to purchase hypothetical meat products marketed with the biosensors.

The researchers surveyed consumers in the UK, with respondents assigned to one of three groups. Each group received a different risk message: In the No Risk Information (NRI) group, respondents did not receive any news on the food-safety incident; in the Low Risk Information (LRI) group, respondents were informed that there was a moderate health risk due to a food-safety incident; and in the High Risk Information (HRI) group, respondents were informed that there was a severe health risk due to a food-safety incident.

They found that respondents in the LRI and HRI groups (with no statistically significant difference between the two groups) were willing to pay more (£0.91; s = £0.72) for meat products with smart biosensors than those in the NRI group (£0.82; s = £0.68). The majority of respondents in both groups were willing to buy meat marketed with biosensors.

 

“Respondents who heard about biosensors developed using nano-technology were not willing to pay a premium for biosensors when risk information was not provided because they did not perceive the benefits of biosensors,” the authors concluded, noting that “Few consumers are aware of smart biosensors. There is a need of more cooperation on behalf of retailers and food manufacturers to increase consumers’ awareness about the benefits of smart biosensors.”

 

 

Laura Dunn Nelson, Intertek Alchemy

Navigating Food Industry Challenges Requires a Comprehensive Crisis Management Plan

By Laura Dunn Nelson
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Laura Dunn Nelson, Intertek Alchemy

The food industry has faced numerous challenges in recent years that have disrupted its stability and normal operations. While it might feel like the industry is finally starting to stabilize, there is still a long way to go to achieve a steady new normal. The industry remains extremely vulnerable to inflation pressures, product shortages, cyberattacks and food fraud. Any one of these risks can send a manufacturer or restaurant scrambling to replace missing ingredients or supplies and resume operations.

In today’s unpredictable landscape, crisis management plans are essential for reducing downtime, safeguarding food quality and maintaining customer trust. These plans help establish backup suppliers in times of supply chain disruptions and bolster defenses against cyberattacks and food fraud. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach, developing a customized crisis management plan tailored to your specific production risks is crucial. Below are some insights into using a crisis management plan to tackle common threats faced by food manufacturers and restaurants.

Vendor Management: Ensuring Continuity

Vendors play a key role in the food industry, and their vulnerabilities can directly impact your food safety and quality. Ingredient shortages and price fluctuations create supply chain disruptions that must be managed through proactive measures.

Including a vendor replacement strategy in the crisis management plan enables quick adaptation to unforeseen circumstances. This strategy should encompass multiple sourcing options, rigorous vendor audits, effective communication channels, comprehensive product specifications and efficient change management processes.

Detecting and Preventing Food Fraud

When supply chains are disrupted, food fraud becomes a serious concern. Counterfeiting, dilution, substitution and mislabeling pose risks to both food quality and safety. To combat food fraud effectively, it’s important to vet suppliers to ensure they provide the correct ingredients and adhere to quality standards.

Integrating your supplier selection processes into the crisis management plan will help ensure consistency as you vet new suppliers. Additionally, frontline employees should receive training to detect food fraud. This includes training that enables them to identify abnormalities in raw materials, manufacturing processes and finished goods.

Risk management is not solely the responsibility of leadership. To effectively combat food fraud, it needs to be part of your frontline worker food safety training program.

Safeguarding Against Cyber Threats

With increasing reliance on technology, the food industry has become more vulnerable than ever to cyber threats. Last year, the U.S. cybersecurity company Dragos identified the food and beverage sector as the second largest victim of cyberattacks, making it imperative to prioritize cybersecurity measures.

While robust security platforms and backup systems are important, the most effective defense lies in having an informed workforce trained to identify and prevent potential attacks. It’s critical to ensure your crisis management plan includes preventative measures such as educating employees on recognizing suspicious emails, updating passwords regularly and avoiding risky online behavior.

Transparent Communication Builds Trust

When changes occur in suppliers, products or ingredients, transparent communication with your customers is vital. The crisis management plan should lay out clear guidelines for informing customers on important updates, including formulation and label changes when different ingredients or formulas are used. These guidelines should have the agreement and support of multiple internal departments, including management, marketing, production, safety and quality. Implementing thorough communication strategies can be time-consuming, but surprising customers with unexpected product changes can cause lasting damage to their trust and loyalty.

In today’s challenging food industry environment, proactive planning and risk mitigation are crucial for preserving business continuity, brand reputation and customer relationships. A comprehensive crisis management plan tailored to address specific threats is essential. By prioritizing cybersecurity, vendor management, fraud prevention and transparent communication, food businesses can navigate the challenges effectively and ensure their long-term success in this rapidly evolving landscape.

Emily Newton, Revolutionized Magazine

Advances in pH-Reliant Intelligent Food Packaging

By Emily Newton
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Emily Newton, Revolutionized Magazine

Food industry professionals are increasingly searching for intelligent food packaging that can signal when consumables are unsafe to use. Solutions encompass time-temperature indicators that give real-time shelf-life indicators and labels that change color to show potential contamination. Recent work in this area focuses on pH-reliant options.

Foods have various pH levels, and lower pH products typically have longer shelf lives, as they are less hospitable to the growth of microorganisms. Following are some of the latest efforts to harness the power of pH to enhance food safety.

Films Made from Bio-Based Ingredients

Researchers are looking at plant-based pigments to create pH-responsive packaging and reduce the use of chemical-based triggers. Efforts in this area include pH-responsive films made from hydrogels, including films made of anthocyanins (water-soluble pigments) from red cabbage, which contains 24 types of anthocyanins. The films, which are biodegradable, change color as the pH of the food changes. In another case, scientists wanted to see how pH-sensitive packaging would perform in high-ammonia environments. They put film on a package of fish for 72 hours and noticed a resultant color change that indicated spoilage.

Work elsewhere has involved making color-changing films from chitosan, a sugar derived from external shellfish skeletons. The main benefit of these films is that they provide visible and easy-to-understand indicators of possible spoilage. A secondary perk is that chitosan has antimicrobial properties, which could extend shelf life and help manufacturers maintain quality.

One low-tech option involves packaging a consumable with a sachet filled with a substance that can alter the food’s pH level.

Moving pH Sensors from Processing Plants to Packaging

Food processors have long used pH sensors to provide valuable data during specific food development and manufacturing processes, ranging from fermentation to pasteurization. The main goal is to verify that the pH level is within the desired range after a process’s completion. In a 2022 study, researchers tested a salicylic acid-based carbon electrode paired with a pH sensing element based on electropolymerized flavanone and found that the sensor had a 0.03-pH-unit maximum error rate.

A 2020 study, which involved treating lychee fruit with a specially engineered chitosan-based coating, showed the coating reduced pH levels during an 18-day storage period, making the fruit stay fresher for longer.

Elsewhere, researchers used 3D printing to make fruit labels that preserve freshness. Each label contained cellulose nanofibers that held growth regulators and chitosan. The team pre-programmed the nanofibers to inject the contents into the fruits at desired intervals. Tests showed this innovation caused a six-day extension of fruit shelf life. The labels included a color-changing component to monitor freshness.

In addition to a developing biodegradable options, researchers are also finding ways to make pH sensors smaller. A graduate student at Southern Methodist University recently developed a disposable pH sensor that’s only 10 millimeters wide and 2 millimeters long. That small size makes it suitable for virtually all food packages. Additionally, this device is inexpensive to develop with minimal labor, making it an economical option.

It has become increasingly clear that use and sell-by dates are not the most accurate means to inform consumers if food is still safe. However, intelligent food packaging developments that track pH levels can facilitate improvements that reduce food waste and the risk of illness due to foodborne pathogens.

Some of these technologies are still under development, and it will take time to determine if they’re sufficiently scalable for industrial use. But, as intelligent food packaging becomes more commonplace, decision-makers will have new tools to gain a competitive edge, and protect both their bottom lines and consumers’ health.

 

 

 

Justin Dranschak

Cell Cultured Meat: Where Are We Now?

By Food Safety Tech Staff
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Justin Dranschak

In June, the USDA FSIS granted label approval and grant of inspection to two companies manufacturing cell-cultured meat: Upside Foods and Good Meat. This was the final step in the U.S. regulatory process, opening the door for commercialization. We spoke with Justin Dranschak, Director of BioPharma at Molecular Devices, about a potential timeline to sales, what this means for other manufacturers of lab-grown meat products and what impact these products may have on the U.S. and international food supply. A former employee with the Ohio Department of Agriculture and Siliker Labs, Dranschak has been working on cell line development for the past 10 years.

The FDA recently announced that it had no further questions about the safety of two cell-cultured meat products, which then went on to gain USDA grant of inspection and label approval. Can Upside Foods and Good Meat now sell their products commercially, and are these products ready for commercialization?

Dranschak: These approvals mean they can come to market, so the companies can now move forward with full-scale biofabrication. In terms of commercialization, there are still some challenges in terms of achieving price parity with meats now sold at the store level. The next step is optimizing production and scaling up the capacity of these systems. Everything up to now has been done on a small to medium scale, with a focus on thorough, rigorous testing. Scaling up from small to medium to large is a big challenge, and we’ve seen that in a lot of biological workflows as you’re dealing with different types of cells. They will need to optimize production and consistency of quality to ensure what they’re putting out in stores really matches what customers are looking for.

I recently saw a speaker who noted that the amount of meat or cells you need to create a final product is really not efficient or optimized? Has that been remedied or does that continue to be a challenge?

Dranschak: That is probably the No. 1 issue that is being looked at from a development perspective. But there are a lot of novel breakthroughs that are just on the periphery in terms of different styles of growth media that we can use, and different styles of vats and containers that we can use to ensure that the cells are getting correct feeding at the correct time and that you are then moving those onto the next step of the process at the right time. There are new technologies for monitoring and visualizing those cells. But those scaling efforts are the obstacle right now.

When developing lab grown meat, what is the manufacturing process?

Dranschak: The process starts with instrumentation called single cell printers. The company starts with a single cell taken from an animal, whichever animal they are using, and then they identify the cells of interest and put those in a machine that is then going to dispense a single cell into a 96-well plate. From there, they track that cell as it grows and multiplies. As you grow and multiply those cells, you also need to monitor them over time and prove that they did start from a single cell—that’s proof of monoclonality and that is what the FDA requires. The FDA wants to know where that cell came from and also the stability—ensuring that cell is not going to change or modify over time.

Once you’ve identified that you have these cells that match all the desired characteristics, that’s when you move into quality and production scale. At this point, you’re interested in things such as nutritional content and also biological content. Are the proteins in these cells the same as what we would see in regular chicken or fish? Are we seeing the same levels as we increase the number cells that we are producing in these vats? So, it comes down to a number of different groups working together in tandem to produce cell lines that are going to taste how consumer expect them to taste, and to ensure consistency over time.

If you start with a chicken, for example, and you extract some cells, do you then need to do that extraction for each future piece of chicken or can you build your own cell bank that becomes your product base?

Dranschak: You create a cell bank. These companies are developing thousands of cells and cell banks, and as they go through their processes they’re learning from each cell bank—identifying cells or methods that might over-produce or under-produce something. These cells are held for future learning so they can call on them at any time for development purposes or for future production runs.

What is the timeline in terms of producing a final product from a single cell?

Dranschak: It can take anywhere from 12 to 18 months up to 3 years. When looking at food versus a biological therapeutic, it’s a much more defined process, so I do see significant opportunities for shortening that cycle using automation—moving from more manual processes and synergizing those with robotics to move things in a higher capacity through the system. With advancements in AI and software, we’re also going to see a lot of process optimization in terms of the actual building design of these systems and incorporating the safety and sterilization processes that we have in pharmaceuticals and biotech back into the food industry for development.

Are there differences in terms of progress in the areas of development of cell-cultured poultry products vs. beef or seafood?

Dranschak: In terms of the path forward, this [FDA and USDA approvals] represents a major step because it provides a regulatory roadmap for the food industry and other industries using cell-cultured products. That being said, each process is different. Each cell line and each cell type has its own unique challenges in terms of how they grow, taste, function, etc. But the overall framework from a regulatory perspective has been set.

There is some wariness about cell-cultured meat, even within the food industry, are there unique safety concerns for lab grown meat?

Dranschak: They are largely the same. I previously worked in a food analytical lab doing microbiological testing with Siliker Laboratories. You’re going to be performing the exact same tests from the pathogen level as well as from a food characterization level. The main difference is the manufacturing process, and all of that has been extensively documented. It is extremely safe. Lab-grown meat does come with challenges from a public health perspective because it is something new. Overcoming that challenge requires education.

To me, this is an amazing and positive step forward. It offers us an opportunity to meet food challenges in parts of the world where, for example, they are unable to have access to meat on a regular basis. Lab grown meat allows us to address global food crises and support global health through science and the development of new products.

 

 

Darin Detwiler

Bringing Food Safety to the Masses

By Food Safety Tech Staff
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Darin Detwiler

Food safety is set to gain national prominence with the release of “Poisoned: The Dirty Truth About Your Food.” The documentary from director Stephanie Soechtig was inspired by the book, Poisoned: The True Story of the Deadly E. Coli Outbreak That Changed the Way Americans Eat, by Jeff Benedict, which tells the story of the landmark 1993 Jack in the Box E. Coli outbreak.

The film premiered on June 9 at the Tribeca film festival and will launch on Netflix in Fall 2023. We spoke with Dr. Darin Detwiler, author, founder and CEO of Detwiler Consulting Group, and professor at Northeastern University, whose son Riley died as a result of the outbreak at just 16 months old, about his involvement in the documentary, who the film aims to reach, and changes that could be implemented to strengthen America’s food safety system.

How did the documentary come together and how did you get involved?

Tribeca Poisoned Premiere
Sarah Sorcher, Marion Nestle, Christine Haughney Dare-Bryan, Julie Marler, Bill Marler, Darin Detwiler

Dr. Detwiler: The film makers bought the rights to the book Poisoned by Jeff Benedict, But where Benedict’s book really looks at 1993 and the immediate aftermath of the Jack-in-the-Box E. coli outbreak, the filmmakers also wanted to look at the 30 years since the outbreak. We connected because I had written Food Safety: Past, Present and Predictions, and in that book I talk about 1993 and the immediate aftermath, but I also talk about the Peanut Corporation of America, the romaine lettuce outbreak and other landmark cases over the past three decades. I was a good resource for them in terms of my experience in 1993 with the death of my son, who was one of those four who died as a result of the E. Coli outbreak, and also in terms of my work with USDA and the FDA and my role as an academic who speaks on food safety and food safety policy.

Who is the intended audience in terms of who the filmmakers were hoping to speak to and in terms of who you hope to reach?

Dr. Detwiler: I love the fact that there are different audiences for the documentary. This is an opportunity for food safety professionals to understand the legacy of the E. Coli outbreak and the why behind the protocols, procedures, and expectations in regulatory compliance.

But what excites me is that this documentary was made for the general public, and it can hit the hearts and the stomachs of everyone. Everyone eats, and for more than 50% of people, their first job is somehow connected to food. Could this help someone who is working on a food production line better understand the history behind food handling and food safety requirements?

At the premiere there were so many questions from the audience and people were saying, “I had no idea you could get it E. coli without even eating a contaminated product. I had no idea this is still an issue.” This documentary could impact the decision making of several different categories of stakeholders who all have a role to play in terms of the bigger picture of food safety.

It must be painful to keep revisiting and telling the story of your son’s death.

Detwiler an Riley
Dr. Detwiler and son Riley.

Dr. Detwiler: It’s a way from me to pay respect to my son, and this might sound Pollyannaish, but it also helps to memorialize his story and extend the legacy of his life to new audiences.

If my son was alive, he’d be older than I am now—I was 24 in 1993 and Riley would be 31 today. For 30 years I have been sharing his story, and it has served two purposes. One is to help improve food safety at the core level and two is to keep my promise to myself. Right after my son died, I spoke with President Bill Clinton on the phone, and I said, “I feel like I need to help and be a part of this.” My thinking was, whatever I can do in terms of science or technology or laws and policy, we’re going to make it such that families in the future will not be dealing with these problems, but clearly they still are.

There was also a sense of, while I’m faced with losing my son, I don’t want to be faced with this notion that my son lost his father. When I do this work, in my mind it’s like I’m still spending time with him. I’m still there for him. And I do this not only for myself and my son but also for other people who have been affected by foodborne illness. To say “the CDC estimates that 48 million Americans become sick every year, that some 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die every year,” that’s usually the most lip service anyone gives to the idea of foodborne illness. When I tell the story of my son’s illness and other family’s experiences, that puts a face and an emotion to those numbers. My goal is to not only impact those with the ability to change the industry, but also serve those 3,000 families every year—that’s 90,000 families since my son died—that live with that chair forever empty at their family table. I saw this documentary as being very important because the true burden of foodborne illness is represented, and representation is an important part of the healing and recovery from such an event.

I was surprised to learn that back in 1993 E. coli in beef wasn’t a significant concern on the federal level, but was more stringently regulated among a small number of states. Are there food safety risks today where you feel we’re lacking in oversight or regulation?

Dr. Detwiler: There were very few states that were reporting E. coli at that time, but within a year that had quadrupled. Today, we have Pulsenet and Foodnet, which are federal collections of data related to foodborne illness incidents, and we have much better—when you’re looking at multi-state outbreaks—data being collected.

One area that’s of interest is the FDA Food Code in that it is updated regularly, but there are some states that use very old versions of it. When I was doing my doctorate research just a few years ago in 2015-2016, there were some states that were using versions of the Food Code there were over 20 years old, and clearly the science has changed.

On the federal level, there are 15 different federal agencies that play a role in food safety as well as many different state agencies, but you don’t just have 50 states. Within those 50 states you have either the State Department of Agriculture or the State Department of Health overseeing food safety—each of which have two different missions and two different sources of funding. On top of that there are more than 3,000 different jurisdictions for food safety in the U.S. when you start looking at military bases, tribal reservations, universities and colleges, etc. In some places it’s regulated by the state and in others it’s by county or even by city. So there are a lot of moving pieces and a lot of different players, resulting in this patchwork of regulatory agency oversight.

Shortly after the 1993 outbreak, the USDA declared that E. coli was an illegal adulterant in meat, and today we rarely see cases of food safety failure related to E. coli and meat. However, there were no significant changes in FDA policy until FSMA was passed in 2010, and the rules didn’t start to be implemented until 2016.

Imagine if we had a single food safety agency. Imagine if there had been a single agency 30 years ago and if the change in policy hadn’t just impact food regulated by the USDA but instead impacted all foods.

Does this mean you support the potential move to create a single Human Foods program at the federal level?

Dr. Detwiler: I do support it and believe it would solve some of these gaps. When you look at other nations you don’t have the division among the states like we have here. Just the sheer number of agencies at the federal level, economically it doesn’t make sense. Look at what happened after 9/11. Suddenly you have the Department of Homeland Security that says we can cut through some of these problems by creating a federal agency that brings together all the different agencies involved in national security. Imagine if something like that was done in terms of food safety.

There are a lot of factors to consider, and this is a complicated issue. I don’t think this documentary will answer all the questions, but I hope that it will compel consumers to start asking these questions. That is where we can potentially see the greatest change and improvement in food safety.

You mentioned that in the documentary the film makers wanted to focus on the legacy of 1993, what in your words is the legacy of 1993?

Dr. Detwiler: In terms of the positive, it gained the media’s attention. We have a food safety culture and industry today that has radically grown when you look at magazines and websites and conferences and things like that. What I do find unfortunate is that it is focused on industry. Imagine if all the messaging about driver safety was kept within the automobile industry and not actually getting to drivers. This documentary fills a big gap by focusing on the consumer. We also have seen the positive impact of the USDA declaring E. Coli an illegal adulterant in meat.

Poisoned Film Screen

Some of the things the documentary highlights, however, is the issue of antibiotic resistance and salmonella still being legal in poultry. When you look at some of the things that haven’t changed—for example, we see cattle feed lots that are next to where romaine lettuce is grown, the idea that Hepatitis A could be prevented in the food industry and in restaurants if employees simply got the vaccine to prevent it, and the lack of consequences for food safety failures—there are still areas that are lacking.

Most people don’t realize that with Jack in the Box back in 1993, there were no state or federal charges filed even though the CEO acknowledged—in front of news cameras—that they violated state law on the minimum cooking temperature, resulting in hundreds of illnesses and hospitalizations and the death of four people.

For families who’ve lost a child or their child has been left disabled, these cases have all been settled out of court and out of the public eye. This documentary bypasses all of that and puts this information in a very public package.

Cybersecurity

Food Protection: Challenges and Opportunities

By Food Safety Tech Staff
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Cybersecurity

The recent ransomware attacks on U.S. Government agencies and hundreds of private U.S. companies is a reminder that cybersecurity remains one of the most significant challenges facing the food and agriculture (Ag) industries today. It was a concern that took center stage at a recent OSPA (Outstanding Security Performance Awards) webinar entitled “Food Protection: The Ultimate Security Challenge?”

Presenters Megan Francies, Food Protection Manager at LambWeston, Mark Wittrock, Assistant Director of Health, Food and Agriculture Resilience, Office of Health Security, U.S. Dept of Homeland Security, David Goldenberg, Chief of InfraGard National Sector Security and Resilience Program (NSSRP), Food and Agriculture Sector at UC Davis, Andy Griffiths, European Regional Security Director at Firmenich, Jason Bashura, MPH, RS, Sr. Manager of Global Food Defense at PepsiCo, and moderator Professor Martin Gill, Director of Perpetuity Research & Consultancy International (PRCI), addressed key questions, including:

  • How well protected is our food supply?
  • What are the risks and are we sure we are preparing and responding effectively?
  • How can increased information sharing between and amongst the public and private sectors help to reduce these risks?

Growing Risk for Food and Ag

Griffiths noted that due to hostile actors and regional conflicts, supply chains are seeing increased vulnerability making the implementation of effective transportation security and cargo theft mitigation more important—and more challenging—than ever.

In the U.S. there is a national response framework, but as Wittrock highlighted both public and private entities need to think broadly and holistically to prepare for and coordinate a response to attacks when they occur.

The need for strategic alliances and information sharing and analysis centers (ISACs) that allow organizations to share adverse events and strategies are important, but when there are many stakeholders with different—and often competing—interests, it is difficult to communicate in a language and in a timeline that meets the ideal requirements, added Wittrock. When living in an increasingly global world, we also must remember that “your friends today are not necessarily your friends tomorrow,” he said.

The risk of copycat attacks when an event occurs is also a concern, said Goldenberg.

The Need for Communication and Information Sharing

Francies championed the benefits of transparent and effective communication between government and the private sector. Her view was echoed by several panelists who encouraged more opportunities for organizations to share security breaches in a non-attributable manner to help others prepare for and reduce commonly experienced risks.

When asked, what is the biggest barrier to communication and information-sharing, Wittrock pointed to siloed discussion among key stakeholder groups. “When looking across the entirety of the food and Ag enterprise, it includes many different parts, pieces and stakeholders,” he said. “The communication happens largely in the vacuum of one particular discipline or stakeholder group. What’s lacking first and foremost is that strategic dialogue across communities.”

Efforts to improve communication are often challenged by lack of clear channels through which stakeholders can share information, said Francies. “A lot of times the communication goes out in a way that is not accessible to everybody, and it’s often last minute so people aren’t prepared to provide the insights that we need,” she said. “We need a defined way or area to communicate that is well known and publicly accessible to industry.”

In addition to clear channels, trust needs to be established among organizations and government agencies as well. “Industry has to have trust that the information they are sharing is going to be handled appropriately and that they are getting information that’s trustworthy from other sources,” said Goldenberg. “Unless there is trust across all the sectors and agencies among food and Ag, there is never going to be good communication.”

The need to protect brand reputation is often at the heart of unreported security incidents, said Griffiths. “But I do think there is a willingness to share certainly within industry and there is a need within law enforcement to obtain that information to determine how big the problem or issue is,” he added. “The problem is, there is no mechanism by which this information can be exchanged in a safe and confidential way that maintains the integrity of both the source and also the information that’s being shared. Yet, unless everyone shares across the board through collaboration or cooperation, we’re forever on the run.”

In light of the significant challenges raised related to communication and information sharing, Bashura shared successes that are taking place, including the ASIAS Aero Portal, which was developed by the FFA and Mitre to ensure security of the aviation industry, Operation Opson, a joint operation between Europol and INTERPOL developed to target fake and substandard food and beverages, the Food Industry Intelligence Network, and resources available through the Food Defense Resource Center. In terms of the importance of building trust among industry, Bashura encouraged leaders to reach out to each other. “Pick up the phone. Make a call, send an email, or shoot a text,” he said.

 

 

Apple Juice

FDA Sets 10 ppb Action Level for Inorganic Arsenic in Apple Juice

By Food Safety Tech Staff
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Apple Juice

The FDA has issued a final guidance “Action Level for Inorganic Arsenic in Apple Juice,” which identifies for industry the action level of 10 parts per billion (ppb) for inorganic arsenic in apple juice. The guidance supports the FDA’s goal to reduce exposure to environmental contaminants from foods commonly consumed by babies and young children.

The FDA noted that its testing results reflect a trend in reductions in the amount of inorganic arsenic in apple juice on the market, with an increasing percentage of samples testing below 3 ppb and 5 ppb. However, since the release of the draft guidance in 2013, the agency has identified some apple juice samples with inorganic arsenic levels above 10 ppb—the level the agency considers achievable with the use of good manufacturing practices.

Though non-binding, the FDA expects that the 10 ppb action level will help to encourage manufacturers to reduce levels of inorganic arsenic in apple juice. The agency said that it will continue its current practice of monitoring arsenic in apple juice samples and if testing identifies inorganic arsenic in apple juice above 10 ppb, the FDA will consider this action level, in addition to other factors, to determine whether to take enforcement action.