Tag Archives: Focus Article

FDA

FDA Launches Office of Digital Transformation

By Food Safety Tech Staff
No Comments
FDA

Taking a step further in prioritizing technology and data modernization efforts, today the FDA announced the launch of a new Office of Digital Transformation. The office realigns the agency’s information technology, data management and cybersecurity roles into a central office that reports directly to the FDA commissioner. The reorganization will also help FDA further streamline its data and IT management processes, reducing duplication of processes, and promote best practices, technological efficiencies and shared services in a strategic and secure way.

“Good data management, built into all of our work, ultimately helps us meet and advance the FDA’s mission to ensure safe and effective products for American families,” said Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, M.D., in an FDA news release. “The agency began these efforts because, as a science-based agency that manages massive amounts of data to generate important decisions and information for the public, innovation is at the heart of what we do. By prioritizing data and information stewardship throughout all of our operations, the American public is better assured of the safety of the nation’s food, drugs, medical devices and other products that the FDA regulates in this complex world. This reorganization strengthens our commitment to protecting and promoting public health by improving our regulatory processes with a solid data foundation built in at every level.”

 

Anthony Macherone, Agilent
FST Soapbox

The Link Between Exposure to Xenobiotic Pesticides and Declining Honeybee Colonies and Honey

By Anthony Macherone, Ph.D.
No Comments
Anthony Macherone, Agilent

According to data from the Bee Informed Partnership, a national collaboration of leading research labs and universities in agricultural science, managed honeybee populations declined by nearly 40% between Oct. 1, 2018 and April 1, 2019. This is a 7% greater decline compared to the same timeframe during the previous winter.1

Scientists are examining different environmental factors such as the increased use of pesticides and the use of chemicals in agriculture as causes for the rapid decline in global honeybee numbers.

Recent research conducted by my team and I revealed a potentially key reason for the decline in honeybee populations as a result of Nosema ceranae (N. ceranae), a prevalent infection in adult honeybee populations. My team established a link between N. ceranae-infected honeybee colonies and changes in pheromone levels, which in turn, may have a social impact on communication in honeybee colonies.

Moreover, the significant decline in the global honeybee population is likely to be driving an increase in fraudulent honey, meaning that both governments and regulators need to invest in the latest technology to test honey products for authenticity, nutritional values and safety.

The Significance of Honey in Our Global Diet and the Problem at Hand

Honey has been a part of our diet for the past 8,000 years, and with numerous health benefits in addition to having a favorable taste, it is one of the most popular foods across the globe.2

Honeybees produce honey from the nectar of flowering plants, and they are considered a “keystone species” since one-third of human food supply depends on pollination by honeybees.3The species is responsible for pollinating numerous fruit, nut, vegetable and field crops such as apples, almonds, onions and cotton.

The increase of pesticides and chemicals in the environment has been cited as a reason for the decline in bee populations, which has occurred in Western European countries such as France, Belgium, Germany, the UK, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands, as well as countries such as the United States, Russia and Brazil.4 In fact, the number of honeybee colonies in Europe fell by an average of 16 per cent over the winter of 2017–2018, according to findings published in the Journal of Apiculture Research.5

Global pesticide usage was predicted to increase to 3.5 million tons globally in 2020, which could mean that honeybee populations will continue to diminish at an exponential rate due to the increased use of pesticides.6

The Impact of Pesticides on Global Honeybee Populations

In 2019, a research project was initiated to explore the link between exposure to xenobiotic pesticides and increasing susceptibility to the N. ceranae infection in honeybee colonies, one of the most common infections in adult honeybee populations. The findings suggested that it is not the amount of pesticide exposure, nor a particular kind of pesticide exposure, but rather the number of exposure events from different xenobiotics that is associated with N. ceranae, which infected hives, thereby causing them to diminish.7

For discovery-based (non-targeted) exposome profiling of honeybee extracts, a gas chromatography/quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer (GC/Q-TOF) was used. Additionally, spectral library searches and compound annotation were performed using the NIST 14, RTL Pesticides and the Fiehn Metabolomics libraries to provide efficient and timely research outputs.8

Expanding on this research further in 2021, a scientist’s team established a link between N. ceranae-infected honeybee colonies and changes in pheromone levels, which showed a potential impact on social communication in honeybee colonies. While it was concluded that further analysis is required, as research points to the real possibility that N. ceranae-infected honeybee colonies show increased alarm pheromones and may affect hive communication, which could ultimately, be a reason for the collapse of colonies.9

As N. ceranae is causing honeybee populations to dwindle worldwide, the decline in ‘real’ honey supplies is correspondent with an increase in ‘fake’ honey. Inauthentic honey products cause businesses and consumers to lose out, as ‘fake’ honey floods the market and makes producing ‘real’ honey more expensive.

Growth in Fake Honey

The global honey market has grown from 1.5 million tons produced annually in 2007 to more than 1.9 million tons in 2019 and the market is estimated to be worth $7 billion, however the decline in bee populations has led to an increase in honey adulteration to fill the global demand for honey.10

Declining supplies of authentic honey combined with the strong consumer demand for honey has driven significant adulteration of this product. Honey is considered to be one of the most adulterated foods after milk and olive oil, with every seventh jar of honey opened daily around the globe thought to be fake.11, 12 Consequently, legitimate honeybee keepers and business owners are forced to slash costs, which is problematic for those who depend on selling authentic honey.

To put into perspective the scale of the issue, the European agricultural organization, Copa-Cogeca noted that most honey imported from China into Europe is mixed with syrup.13 In 2018, the Honey Authenticity Project in Mexico commissioned tests for British supermarket honey products, and 10 out of 11 products failed the tests due to suspected sugar adulteration.14

While in the United States, it was recently reported that thousands of commercial beekeepers have taken legal action against the country’s largest honey importers and packers for allegedly flooding the market with hundreds of thousands of tons of “fake” honey.15 Furthermore, a recent workshop led by the South Africa Bee Industry Organization (SABIO) also conducted research on the impact of fraudulent honey, and the organization found that honey imports into South Africa have tripled to 6,000 tons a year, 60% of which come from China.16 As the demand for honey products stays robust but authentic honey supplies dwindle, the issue of counterfeit honey will continue to worsen.

Testing Methods to Identify Authentication

The issue of fraudulent food products like honey has driven governments to set up laws and departments dedicated to food integrity. Examples include FSMA, the UK National Food Crime Unit, Chinese Food Safety Law, and European Commission Food Integrity Project.

Food retailers often have contractual agreements with suppliers that require them to carry out authenticity testing of their ingredients, which can be carried out by third-party laboratories.17 Food adulteration can be identified via targeted and non-targeted testing and common testing methods include molecular spectroscopy solutions for ‘in the field’ screening and more in-depth laboratory analysis to determine quantities of ingredients.

Analytical instrument manufacturers have been working closely with governments to provide the latest methods to test the authenticity of honey products, as well as working with the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists (AOAC) on the development of both targeted and non-targeted standards for authenticity testing in milk, honey and olive oil.
Measuring contaminants is a key solution to identifying counterfeit honey and gas chromatographs are able to analyze and quantify the absence or presence of hundreds of pesticides in organic-labeled honey.18

Testing and analysis can be done using a range of analytical instrumentation such as solid phase microextraction followed by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (SPME-GC/MS), inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), and gas/liquid chromatography/quadrupole time-of-flight (GC/Q-TOF and LC/Q-TOF). These instruments can be coupled with innovative software solutions for advanced data analysis.19

Future Research Must Continue

The spread of diseases such as N. ceranae, which have been shown to be aggravated by human-induced environmental factors, are decimating global honeybee populations, which in turn is negatively impacting ecosystems and humans, and the availability of authentic honey. This demise in authentic honey supplies is additionally fueling a rise in fake honey products, where consumers are misled into buying counterfeit honey.

Future research must continue to seek associations with environmental exposures effects on biological pathways and adverse health outcomes in honeybee populations, and in fact, novel environmental exposures have been found to be associated with seven of the top diseases known to affect honeybees. These putative associations must be validated with targeted follow-up studies to determine if they are causative factors in the decline of honeybee populations. If proven to be causative, scientists and policy makers can work together to mitigate these factors and hopefully reverse the global trend of honeybee colony decline.

References

  1. Loss & Management Survey, Bee Informed. Last accessed: June 2021
  2. Agilent.‘The Buzz around Fake Honey’. 2018. Last accessed: June 2021
  3. University of California – Berkeley. ‘Pollinators Help One-third Of The World’s Food Crop Production’. 2006. Last accessed: June 2021
  4. European Parliament. ‘What’s behind the decline in bees and other pollinators?’. 2021. Last accessed: June 2021
  5. Journal of Apiculture Research. ‘Loss rates of honeybee colonies during winter 2017/18 in 36 countries participating in the COLOSS survey, including effects of forage sources’. 2019. Last accessed: June 2021
  6. SN Applied Sciences. ‘Worldwide pesticide usage and its impacts on ecosystem’. 2019. Last accessed: June 2021
  7. PLOS ONE. ‘Honey bee (Apis mellifera) exposomes and dysregulated metabolic pathways associated with Nosema ceranae infection’. 2019. Last accessed: June 2021
  8. PLOS ONE. ‘Honey bee (Apis mellifera) exposomes and dysregulated metabolic pathways associated with Nosema ceranae infection’. 2019. Last accessed: June 2021.
  9. Royal Society Open Science. ‘Increased alarm pheromone component is associated with Nosema ceranae infected honeybee colonies’. 2021. Last accessed: June 2021
  10. Statista. ‘Global market value of honey 2019-2027’. 2021. Last accessed: June 2021
  11. Insider.com. ‘Honey is one of the most faked foods in the world, and the US government isn’t doing much to fix it.’ 2020. Last accessed: June 2021
  12. Dow Jones. ‘Hi honey. I’m not from home.’ Last accessed: June 2021
  13. Apiservices.biz. ‘Copa-Cogeca Position Paper on the European Honey Market.’ February 2020. Available at: Copa-Cogeca position paper on the European honey market (apiservices.biz)
  14.  WIRED. ‘The honey detectives are closing in on China’s shady syrup swindlers’. 2021. Last accessed: June 2021
  15.  The Guardian. ‘US beekeepers sue over imports of Asian fake honey’. 2021. Last accessed: June 2021
  16.  Times Live. ‘Falsely labelled, mixed with syrup or ‘laundered’: Honey fraud is rife in SA’. 2021. Last accessed: June 2021.
  17.  UK Parliament Post. Postnote, number 624. ‘Food Fraud’. Last accessed: June 2021
  18. Agilent. ‘The Health Benefits of Honey’. 2017. Last accessed: June 2021
  19. Agilent. ‘Protecting our honey against food adulteration’. Last accessed: June 2021.

 

FDA

FDA Announces 12 Winners of Traceability Challenge

By Food Safety Tech Staff
No Comments
FDA

Back in May, FDA launched a technology traceability challenge with the goal of promoting innovation in the development of scalable and affordable traceability technology tools for food operations of all sizes. Today, the agency announced the winning teams and their technologies:

  • FarmTabs. Free, downloadable software run on Microsoft Excel to aid small and mid-size farmers manage records for traceability/ farm-related metrics.
  • Freshly. Traceability and batch-tracking software for small businesses (including retailers, manufacturers and distributors).
  • HeavyConnect. Cloud-based digital traceability and compliance documentation solutions, including a mobile app for producers to capture data in the field and share it across the supply chain.
  • ItemChain. Item-level traceability to each party in the supply chain.
  • Kezzler. Solution uses self-service portals to generate item-level identifiers and associate homogenized datasets at the grower level through mobile applications.
  • Mojix. Uses industry standards to link traceability events for each item or lot throughout the supply chain in an open data network.
  • OpsSmart. Cloud-based traceability software solution for food safety, recall management, and traceability in a complex supply chain.
  • Precise’s. Traceability Suite that provides end-to-end supply chain tracking to all segments of the food market, using geospatial, machine learning and IoT technologies.
  • Roambee/GSM/Wiliot’s. Solution uses low-cost IoT sensor tags in with shipment visibility and verification technologies for end-to-end traceability.
  • Rfider. Software-as-a-service that captures, secures and shares critical event data along supply chains to consumers.
  • TagOne. A role-based data capture framework that updates an open source blockchain platform, and uses industry standards to ensure interoperability, and ease of use and data security.
  • Wholechain. Supply chain traceability system that uses blockchain technology to trace products back to the original source.

The videos submitted by each winning company are available on FDA’s webpage that announces the winners.

Jill Stuber, The Food Safety Coach
FST Soapbox

Move the Needle on Food Safety Culture Starting with Your FSQ Team

By Jill Stuber
No Comments
Jill Stuber, The Food Safety Coach

“Yeah, yeah, I know. We’re supposed to have FSQ (Food Safety and Quality) verify the line before we start. But c’mon, we could see the plastic so we just removed it and then we visually inspected all the product on that part of the line. We looked everywhere for the other missing piece. We didn’t find it, so somebody probably found it not knowing what it was and tossed it out. We radioed for someone for FSQ about five minutes ago and no one came. We did what we needed: Stopped the line, found the foreign material, and now we’re running again. We only have an hour of production left and we’re almost done filling this order.”

As the operations supervisor was telling me this, I could feel my entire body become agitated. My blood began to boil, and I had to bite my tongue to avoid saying unkind and unhelpful words.

It wasn’t the first time we’d had foreign material on that line that week. And to top it off, it was the same supervisor telling me they knew the FSQ Team had to be part of foreign material incidents, yet the supervisor decided the situation wasn’t important enough to follow the written SOP on handling foreign material that we all signed off on earlier in the month in an attempt at streamlining the process to be easier to execute.
I’m not sure what made me angrier—the fact we were having this conversation again or that this type of conversation always got under my skin. How was it I was blowing a gasket while the supervisor thought it was no big deal?

It all seemed to come down to a difference in beliefs. A difference in attitudes. A difference in the actions taken when no one is watching. This situation is showing the food safety culture of the organization, and everyone nearby is seeing it. This isn’t uncommon—these every-day moments are displays of the food safety culture within our organizations. These moments are an opportunity to create a new story around food safety culture.

It begs the question: How do we start to re-write food safety culture in these moments?
To write a new story around food safety culture, many say it needs to start at the top. In fact, GFSI, EU Regulations, and the New Era of Smarter Food Safety focus on top leaders creating the mission, values and key performance metrics around food safety culture. While I believe having top leadership support is important, I’d challenge one to consider: Does food safety culture really have to start at the top?

In 1989, Sidney Yoshida unveiled the concept of the “Iceberg of Ignorance” that found large knowledge gaps between senior management and the rest of the organization.1 Yoshida’s research concluded that top leaders are too far removed from the day-to-day operations, which limits them to only see the very tip of a problem, meaning most of the problem isn’t visible to them. When we consider Yoshida’s concept for food safety culture, one may conclude top leaders are unlikely to fully understand the frustration, depth and frequency of stories like the one illustrated above.

Then who is positioned to understand the issues around food safety culture and make a difference? After working with multiple teams across multiple companies in food safety and quality for more than 25 years, I can confidently say, no one wants to see food safety practices and systems working more effectively than the FSQ Team!

FSQ Teams see first-hand the effect of failures in the food safety and quality systems that plague companies through things like product on hold, downtime and customer complaints, as they are often the ones involved with resolving issues. That’s why they are perfectly positioned to make a meaningful, daily impact on how people understand, perceive and embrace food safety behaviors.

Keep in mind, each year additional workload falls to the FSQ Team through new customer requirements, new regulations, new certification requirements, and more. That certainly explains how 60% of people have taken on more tasks than they can get done at work causing confusion in job responsibilities.2,3

Before we add another element to the FSQ plate, we need to ensure the FSQ Team is well positioned and energized to model the food safety behaviors that align with the culture we want to see. The following are several practical steps to support this journey:

  1. Evaluate Workload. Given 60% people have taken on more work than they can get done, evaluating workload is the first step to ensure the FSQ Team is ready to carry the food safety culture torch. Effects of overwork can be displayed as things like stress, or being disconnected, along with siloed work and even disconnected goals.4 Those outward appearing signs don’t typically align with the behaviors and attitudes aligned with the food safety culture wanted. A simple step to support alignment in the every-day behaviors and attitudes to support food safety culture is ensuring workloads are appropriate. An easy workload evaluation is to create a list of tasks, and compare it to the number of hours a person is expected to work. Just like production line time, if the workload is greater than available capacity, adjustment may be needed or vice versa.
  2. Provide Clarity around Decision Making Responsibilities. When actual work tasks aren’t clear, team members may also be unsure of where their decision making authority begins and ends – especially when it comes to food safety culture. Clarity comes from being curious, asking questions, and having conversations. For example: Can FSQ Team Members ask other Team Members to change how they’re doing a task to be more food safe? Should they ask the Team Member’s Lead or Supervisor first? Does it depend on the severity of the situation? When the FSQ Team sees behaviors that exemplify food safety culture, how are they able to recognize those fellow Team Members? When there are several options for safe handling of product, what’s the role of the FSQ Team in deciding which option is selected? Every individual will have a different perspective for these questions. Exploring how decisions are made and aligning across functional areas of the company will help FSQ Team Members carry the messaging around expected attitudes, beliefs and behaviors that support the food safety culture at the organization.
  3. Focus on Mindset. In FSQ, we are here to serve: The business, our team, our customers, and others. Showing up with the positive attitude to serve food safety culture can get lost when firefighting and being worried about getting everything done. After your FSQ Team has a clear picture of workload and responsibilities, a mindset around the food safety culture you want to see can be aligned in just a few minutes a day! Stuart Smalley was on to something when he repeatedly said, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me”. This type of mindset training had enumerable benefits for improved confidence, improved relationships, reduced stress, improving company outcomes, and more.5

The dreamy Food Safety Culture state where the inherent beliefs and behaviors that drive food safety are second nature to all team members is within reach. To reach that dream state, your FSQ Team is perfectly positioned at the front line every day to carry the food safety culture message. By taking these three practical steps, you’ll move the needle for taking care of your FSQ Team, which in turn, moves the needle on food safety culture for your organization.

References

  1. Adonix. (January 31, 2020). Uncovering the Iceberg of Ignorance.
  2. Bolden-Barrett, V. (2019). “Workers with overstuffed to-do lists feel overwhelmed, not organized, study shows“. HR DIVE.
  3. Stange, J. (February 6, 2020). 20 Employee Engagement Statistics that Impact Your Business.
  4. Martins, J. (May 21, 2021). Feeling Overworked? Strategies for Individuals and Teams to Regain Balance.
  5. Dweck, C. (2006). Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
Susanne Kuehne, Decernis
Food Fraud Quick Bites

Don’t Open That Sesame

By Susanne Kuehne
No Comments
Susanne Kuehne, Decernis

Sesame oil is a popular edible oil in China, with fraudulent sesame oil on the rise. The Chinese government released new guidelines to protect consumers from sesame oil fraud. Consumers are strongly advised to carefully check the nutrition label, purchase from reliable sources and not from unauthorized small vendors, be cautious when purchasing sesame oil online, and investigate the oil’s properties such as color and smell.

Sesame plant
Find records of fraud such as those discussed in this column and more in the Food Fraud Database, owned and operated by Decernis, a Food Safety Tech advertiser. Image credit: Susanne Kuehne

Resource

  1. Neo, P. (August 23, 2021) “Food oil fraud: China issues warning about adulterated and blended sesame oils”. Food Navigator-Asia.
STOP Foodborne Illness

STOP Foodborne Illness Kicks Off National Food Safety Education Month with STOP3000 Campaign

By Maria Fontanazza
No Comments
STOP Foodborne Illness
Mitzi Baum, Stop Foodborne Illness
Mitzi Baum, CEO, STOP Foodborne Illness, will moderate a panel about STOP’s Recall Modernization Working Group during an episode of the 2021 Food Safety Consortium Virtual Conference Series. Join us on Thursday, October 14.

Each year the CDC estimates that more than 3000 people die as a result of contracting a foodborne illness. This month—National Food Safety Education Month—STOP Foodborne Illness is launching a fundraising campaign to educate the broader community about the issue, by encouraging participants to take 3000 steps per day.

STOP3000 begins today and runs through the entire month of September. This fundraiser will help STOP Foodborne Illness in its continued efforts to push food safety initiatives forward while engaging with key industry stakeholders, including federal regulatory agencies, food manufacturers, food retailers and the food service community.

“This is a way for everyone to participate in raising awareness about food safety,” Mitzi Baum, CEO of STOP told Food Safety Tech. “It’s about how you can make small changes in your daily habits to reduce the incidence of foodborne illness. People can sign up to walk, ask friends and family to post on their social media, or you can make a donation. Each day we’ll push out food safety facts and information, so you’re getting a little bit of knowledge every day during National Food Safety Education Month.”

If you’re interested in participating in the campaign, you can sign up on the JustGiving website. You can also search for and donate to current participants by typing “STOP3000” into the Search box on the JustGiving site.

Katie Banaszewski, NOW Foods
In the Food Lab

Making Supplements Safer: Tackling the Pesticide Problem

By Katie Banaszewski
No Comments
Katie Banaszewski, NOW Foods

Precise, accurate contaminant analysis is crucial to ensure that dietary supplements are of high quality and free from potentially harmful chemicals, such as heavy metals or pesticide residues. As supplements become an increasingly prevalent part of global health culture, with their global market forecast to reach a value of more than $230 billion by 2027, there is an urgent need to ensure their safety for consumers—but manufacturers face many challenges in this area.

Assuring that dietary supplements are free of pesticide contamination is especially difficult given their botanical ingredients, which can be more complex than other analytes. A prominent obstacle is matrix interference. As most botanical ingredients exist in the form of concentrated extracts, smaller sample sizes are needed to overcome heavy matrix interference, in turn requiring highly sensitive instrumentation to detect minute amounts of pesticide residues.

With this in mind, we adopted an analytical workflow comprising both gas and liquid chromatography (GC and LC) systems for orthogonal residue analysis. GC-MS/MS can achieve fast, robust separation of ~300 pesticide residues, while LC-MS/MS enables analysis of ~280 residues. The GC and LC instruments are sufficiently sensitive to allow dilution of samples to mitigate matrix interference— essential to determine potentially low residue levels in complex matrices, and ensure dietary supplements can confidently be certified safe.

Clearing Analytical Hurdles

Matrix complexity is only increased by the fact that botanical ingredients are sourced from across the world and, therefore, exposed to many different agricultural practices. As a wide range and great many of these botanical ingredients are used to produce supplements, it is challenging to develop sample preparation procedures that are suitable for all products.

To prevent frequent iterations of analytical procedures, we developed one sample preparation workflow for GC-MS/MS and another for LC-MS/MS. In both, samples are hydrated and extracted (using acetonitrile:water and the salts anhydrous magnesium sulfate and sodium chloride) before cleanup by solid-phase extraction (SPE). For LC, various defined combinations of dispersive SPE analysis are used to accommodate different matrices (pigmented, high-fat or high-protein, for example) before samples are diluted prior to analysis. Doing so allows us to optimize sample preparation for particular groups of botanical matrices and target specific matrix mitigation without needing to change the entire workflow.

In addition to the aforementioned analytical hurdles, some lesser-defined commodities lack maximum residue limits, complicating the interpretation of results and specification of acceptable criteria. To mitigate these difficulties, we opted to streamline our data processing and reporting by implementing integrated chromatography data system software for both LC-MS/MS and GC-MS/MS. This enables on-the-spot evaluation of QC criteria and rapid assessment of component presence (or absence) in data review and facilitates swifter and easier cGMP compliance.

Keeping Supplements Safe

Our chosen analytical approach has created robust, sensitive processes for optimized multi-residue analysis of dietary supplement samples in a regulated QC environment.

With uptake of supplements fast increasing, guaranteeing product safety is more important than ever. Improved pesticide screening, and quality control of food ingredients, holds great value for both individual organizations and the industry as a whole, while—crucially—enabling consumers to rest assured about the safety of the products available to them.

Susanne Kuehne, Decernis
Food Fraud Quick Bites

Sergeant Pepper On Duty

By Susanne Kuehne
No Comments
Susanne Kuehne, Decernis
Pepper, food fraud
Find records of fraud such as those discussed in this column and more in the Food Fraud Database, owned and operated by Decernis, a Food Safety Tech advertiser. Image credit: Susanne Kuehne

A Northern Ireland-based analytical lab added white pepper to its portfolio of food authenticity tests based on spectroscopy with chemometric analysis. White pepper, the ripe berries of the piper nigrum plant, is undergoing an additional production step, fetches a higher price than black pepper and therefore is a target for fraudsters. Often, bulking substances like skins, flour, husks and spent materials are used, but in some cases of pepper fraud, the substances used were hazardous to human health.

Resource

  1. Taylor, P. (August 24, 2021). “With white pepper fraud on the up, Bia unveils authenticity test”. Securing Industry.
Beretta Fratelli

Salmonella Outbreak Linked to Uncured Italian Meat, Fratelli Beretta Recalls 862,000 Pounds of Antipasto Products

By Food Safety Tech Staff
No Comments
Beretta Fratelli
Beretta Fratelli
Recalled product produced by Beretta Fratelli. More information available from the USDA website.

New Jersey-based Fratelli Beretta USA has recalled about 862,000 pounds of uncured antipasto products over concern of contamination with Salmonella Infantis and/or Salmonella Typhimurium. Sold nationwide, the Fratelli Beretta prepackaged Uncured Antipasto trays have a best by date of August 27, 2021 through February 11, 2022 and UPC code 073541305316. Thus far, 36 illnesses and 12 hospitalizations have been reported in connection with this outbreak, spanning 17 states. No deaths have been reported.

The Class I recall does not include Italian-style meats sliced at a deli.

The CDC continues its investigation into determining whether more products are linked to the outbreak.

Recall

Q2 Food Recalls Increase 20%, Undeclared Allergens and Quality Top Cause

By Food Safety Tech Staff
No Comments
Recall

For the 23rd quarter in a row, undeclared allergens were the top cause of food recalls and accounted for 45% of them in Q3 2021, according to Sedgwick’s latest Recall Index report. Within allergens, undeclared milk was the leading cause and prepared foods remained the leading category.

“Companies need to concentrate on the basics through the second half of 2021 and final emergence from the COVID-19 pandemic,” the report states. “Amid supply chain pressures, high consumer demand and worker health and safety concerns arising from the coronavirus, food businesses are rightfully focused on their ability to maintain and conduct their core operations in safe manner while delivering quality, safe products to customers.”

FDA Recalls: Notable Numbers (Q2 2021)

  • 106 recalls affecting 7.9 million units
  • 5.8 million units (nearly 69%) impacted by recalls were due to one nut recall
  • 19 recalls were a result of quality issues
  • 18 recalls were a result of foreign material contamination
  • 11 recalls were a result of bacterial contamination—6 from Listeria; 4 Salmonella; and 1 E. coli

USDA Recalls: Notable Numbers (Q2 2021)

  • Recalls increased from 10 (Q1) to 12, but numbers still low compared to 2019 quarterly averages
  • Units impacted dramatically dropped nearly 83% to 207,322 units
  • Undeclared allergens were top cause of recalls, accounting for nearly 42%
    • Soy milk and eggs were main allergens, but first recall of food products due to sesame also occurred
  • Other recall reasons were quality (2), lack of inspection (2), bacterial contamination (2) and foreign material contamination (1)
  • Beef products (93,551 pounds) most impacted category, followed by fish (46,804 pounds)

The report also pointed out that heavy metal regulation will have increased emphasis, as FDA has made it a priority as a result of a report released by Congress earlier this year indicating the presence of dangerous toxic heavy metals found in baby foods.