Tag Archives: Focus Article

2018

The Future of Food Safety: A Year in Review

By Mahni Ghorashi
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2018

We started this Q&A series earlier this year with a clear vision—to gather the success stories, best practices, hurdles and achievements from the best in our industry. Our hope is that as the series expands and evolves, food safety professionals everywhere will be informed and inspired by what the future holds.

Over the course of the year, I had the pleasure of interviewing three such experts: Bob Baker, corporate food safety science and capability director at Mars, Inc, Frank Yiannas, vice president of food safety at Walmart, and Mike Robach, vice president, corporate food safety, quality & regulatory for Cargill.

I encourage you to read the interviews for their unique perspectives, but here are a few of the biggest insights that we can all take with us into 2019.

The Continued Rise of New Technologies

Mike Robach: I am very excited about the application of new technology to our food safety programs. In-line, real-time testing gives an opportunity to manage our processes and make immediate adjustments to assure process control. This allows us to prevent product that is out of control from reaching the marketplace.

Frank Yiannas: The emergence of blockchain technology has also enabled food system stakeholders to imagine being able to have full end-to-end traceability at the speed of thought. The ongoing U.S.-wide romaine lettuce E.coli outbreak showed us, once again, that our traditional paper-based food tracking system is no longer adequate for the 21st century. An ability to deliver accurate, real-time information about food, how it’s produced, and how it flows from farm to table is a game-changer for food safety.

Blockchain has the potential to shine a light on all actors in the food system. This enhanced transparency will result in greater accountability, and greater accountability will cause the food system to self-regulate and comply with the safe and sustainable practices that we all desire.

The Most Exciting Shifts

Baker: What’s encouraging is we’re seeing is a willingness to share information. At Mars we often bring together world experts from across the globe to focus on food safety challenges. We continue to see great levels of knowledge sharing and collaboration.

There are also new tools and new technologies being developed and applied. Something we’re excited about is a trial of portable ‘in-field’ DNA sequencing technology on one of our production lines in China. This is an approach that could, with automated sampling, reduce test times.

Yiannas: While there is no doubt that there are numerous new and emerging challenges in food safety, the many advancements being made should give us hope that we can create a safer, more efficient and sustainable food system.

There is progress being made on many fronts: Whole genome sequencing is becoming more accessible; new tools are being developed for fraud detection; and FSMA is introducing stringent public-health surveillance measures that have dramatic implications for U.S. retailers and suppliers and our import partners.

Most importantly, consumers are now overwhelmingly interested in transparency. People today are further removed from how food is grown, produced and transported than at any other time in human history. Plus, they increasingly mistrust food and food companies due to the food outbreaks and scares we have faced in recent years.

Recalls and the Role of Regulation

Robach: I think FSMA implementation is going okay right now. There’s still a long way to go, and I am always concerned about making sure investigators are applying the rules and regulations in a consistent manner. I see the intentional adulteration rule as an upcoming challenge. It is one thing to conduct a vulnerability assessment and adjust your programs based on the results. It’s another to develop and implement a program that will prevent intentional adulteration as you would to reduce or prevent microbiological contamination.

I believe that food safety management programs are constantly improving and that our food is as safe as it has ever been. However, we still have a lot of work to do. At GFSI, we are continually improving our benchmarking requirements and increasing transparency in the process. We have better public health reporting and our ever-improving analytical technology allows us to detect contaminants at lower and lower levels. The industry is working collaboratively to share best practices and promote harmonized food safety management systems throughout the supply chain.

Baker: At Mars, quality is our first principle and we take it seriously—if we believe that a recall needs to be made in order to ensure the safety of our consumers, then we will do it. We also share lessons from recalls across our business to ensure that we learn from every experience.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a safe place for businesses to share such insights with each other. So although we are seeing more collaboration in the field of food safety generally, critical knowledge and experience from recalls is not being shared more broadly, which may be having an impact.

Looking Ahead

Baker: The food safety challenges facing us all are complex and evolving. Water and environmental contaminants are areas that industry and regulators are also looking at, but all of these challenges will take time to address. It’s about capturing and ensuring visibility to the right insights and prioritizing key challenges that we can tackle together through collaboration and knowledge sharing.

…

We’re looking forward to continuing our quest in the new year and already have a few exciting experts lined up. Stay tuned!

Chelle Hartzer, Orkin
Bug Bytes

Filthy Flies Can Put Your Operations at Risk

By Chelle Hartzer
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Chelle Hartzer, Orkin

When we think about dirty pests, cockroaches are usually the first to come to mind. But while the conditions they thrive in are disgusting, flies breed and feed in the filthiest areas. Their lifestyle means their bodies can be covered in dangerous, potentially disease-inducing pathogens, which can be spread anytime they land on a surface or their body comes into contact with something.

House flies are born as maggots, emerging into their larval stage from tiny eggs laid anywhere decaying organic matter can be found. After splashing about in the grime and decay and consuming just about anything they can find, the larvae leave their food source and crawl around seeking out cool, dry, protected places. A shell forms around the pupae, where they remain for a brief time before turning into adults. This entire process takes less than two weeks from egg to breeding adult. Once they’re adults, house flies take off in search of more decaying organic matter and moisture to lay their eggs in and continue the processes.

Essentially, a house fly spends its entire life cycle either crawling around in filth or flying around to find new sources of filth. Add in the fact that they reproduce rapidly, and it’s easy to see why they’re a food safety threat. But they’re not the only species of fly that plagues food processing facilities, as fruit flies and moth flies are two other incredibly common fly species that love to make food processing facilities a new home.

To prevent flies, the first step is to take a close look at your current integrated pest management (IPM) program and ensure your program focuses on taking a proactive approach to mitigating pest issues. But before discussing the specifics of how to protect a facility from these fly invaders, it is important to know how and why they get into a facility in the first place. Each species has slightly different locations where they’re likely to be found, which should be monitored closely to ensure they don’t become hot spots.

Let’s look at the three most common fly species most likely to plague a food processing facility:

House Flies

House flies are persistent and active. Each time they pause to rest on floors, walls or ceilings, remember they’re potentially dropping off disease-causing pathogens. House flies are known to transfer more than 100 pathogens resulting in ailments like typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera and dysentery. They’ll feed on any moist human food, animal food, garbage, carcasses and just about any other wet or damp organic material. Flies detect a food source and hone in on it, which is why they’ll be looking for a chance to invade your food processing facility.

Moth Flies

Although moth flies feed on organic matter and sewage, they’re found in moist areas coated with nutrient-laden organic material. They are sometimes called drain flies because (you guessed it) they are often found in drains. They love the buildup that sticks around the pipes, and once they start reproducing, they can be a nuisance to eliminate. Usually, you’ll never see drain fly eggs and larvae because they drop irregular masses of egg sacs that hatch into larvae, which then live in the gelatinous film inside drains. From there, they mature into pupae and then flying adults, which is when you’ll start to notice them. This is why regular drain cleaning, with a foaming cleaner, is important in controlling these fly issues.

Fruit Flies

Like drain flies, fruit flies are named aptly. They’re most attracted to rotting or decaying fruit and vegetables, but they also enjoy fermented items like beer, liquor and wine. Aside from the products themselves, fruit flies may also breed and develop in drains, garbage disposals, trash cans and even mop buckets. Fruit flies are also known for being a major risk to contaminate food with bacteria and other pathogens. If there is food waste present, fruit flies want to be there. Finding their source and eliminating it is especially important for successful control.

Now, the most important strategy for preventing flies—and most pests in general—is to implement a robust sanitation plan. Flies are looking for food and water to survive, so any source of organic matter or moisture is going to be likely to attract them. And once they’re inside, flies are likely to stay there. Most won’t travel more than a few hundred feet from the spot they were born in their entire lifetime. While small flies are more likely to be found breeding inside facilities, large flies are likely to be breeding outside and flying inside structures.

Consider these tips, as they can help you keep flies and other pest threats away:

  • Make sanitation a priority. Sanitation is one of the most important ways to help reduce pests. Flies love any damp organic matter they can find, so clean up messes as soon as they occur. And don’t forget to take out the trash on a regular basis. That means at least daily. Don’t miss cleaning the insides of trash bins, liners often leak and a buildup of material can be present underneath them.
  • Swap outdoor lighting. Use outdoor sodium-vapor lights, especially near entrances/exits to the inside of your facility. Lights can be placed away from the building to draw flies away and reduce populations at the same time. Ensure that inside lights don’t shine out at night and attract night flying insects and flies in.
  • Install automatic doors. Automatic doors give flying pests a smaller window of opportunity to get indoors by reducing the amount of time that doors remain open. For greater effectiveness, install two sets of automatic doors that only open once the other is closed to create a vestibule. Installing air curtains behind these doors can also help block pests from finding a way inside. Air curtains alone aren’t perfect, but they can help some.
  • Inspect loading and unloading areas. Shipment areas are a prime location for flying pests to wander in. Make sure all doors form a tight seal when shut and are not allowed to stay open for extended periods of time.
  • Seal cracks and crevices. Just about any gap, no matter how small, can be big enough for flies to find a way inside. Door sweeps and weather stripping can be installed to minimize these gaps. You can also use weather-resistant caulk to seal gaps on the exterior of your building, although this will likely take some time and a team effort at larger facilities.
  • Clean drains on a regular basis. Even if you don’t have a lot of “wet” processing, all drains, including break room, restroom, and locker room drains need to be cleaned. Small flies can develop in as little as seven days, so weekly cleaning is a must.

Implement these sanitation and exclusion efforts as part of your ongoing IPM program. With flies, sanitation cannot be stressed enough. They are living and breeding in conditions that need to be cleaned up, inside and outside. As with any pest issues, it is important to contact a pest management professional if it seems things are getting out of hand. If you’re seeing flies daily inside the building, that’s probably a good sign that your products may be at risk!

Deirdre Schlunegger, Stop Foodborne Illness
Food Safety Culture Club

With Retirement in 2019, A Farewell from Deirdre Schlunegger

By Deirdre Schlunegger
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Deirdre Schlunegger, Stop Foodborne Illness

It is hard to believe that nearly nine years have passed since I joined Stop Foodborne Illness to lead the organization. I will be retiring at the end of May 2019, and many memories will journey with me for the rest of my days on planet earth. I have learned so much through constituents, colleagues and new-found friends. It is so humbling and such a deep honor to serve our constituents. I hold deep gratitude for the individuals and families who give so much during their time of grief while working to improve food safety; they give so freely of their time to share their stories to make a difference for others. It is only for their stories and their sharing that the organization exists. Engaging with food safety professionals throughout the food industry in an effort to improve food safety has been gratifying, and working alongside food safety advocates and consumer groups has been humbling. The staff members at Stop Foodborne Illness are relentless in their commitment and hard work, and they will be remembered. I hope that we leave a mark, a legacy that moved the needle in some small way towards the improvement of food safety. And I hope that the momentum will continue, that there will be people who will not be sick because of the work that has been done under my leadership alongside others, and that the needle will continue to advance forward so that others don’t have to experience the intense and deep pain that comes from being ill or watching a loved one suffer.

I would like to thank Stop’s Board of Directors, who have spent countless hours devoting their time and efforts in their commitment public awareness.

Thank you to everyone who has served as a guide, mentor and friend over the years. You will be remembered. Thanks for all that you do to advance food safety!

Editor’s Note: We would like to that Deirdre for her contributions to Food Safety Tech over the years in the Food Safety Culture column and for her service to the industry. We wish her the best of luck! Deirdre’s cause will continue, as the publication will continue to welcome contributors to this special column.

Food Safety Tech

Call for Abstracts: Be a Part of the 2019 Food Safety Supply Chain Conference

By Food Safety Tech Staff
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Food Safety Tech

The supply chain is a potentially weak and vulnerable part of a company’s food safety plan. The annual Food Safety Supply Chain Conference is months away and we are accepting abstracts for presentations. The conference takes place May 29–30, 2019 in Rockville, MD.

If you have expertise in the following areas, we invite you to submit an abstract to present at the conference:

  • Food Safety Supply Chain Vulnerabilities & Solutions
  • Audits & Inspections
  • How to Write Supplier Specifications
  • Blockchain Technology
  • FSMA’s Sanitary Transportation Compliance Tools & Techniques
  • Supply Chain Traceability
  • FSMA’s FSVP Compliance Tools & Best Practices
  • Data, Predictive Analysis
  • Recalls: barcode labeling, case histories and lessons learned
  • Testing Strategies of the Supply Chain
  • Supplier Verification Best Practices
  • Supply Chain Risk Management
  • Food Safety Transportation, Distribution and Logistics
  • Food Authenticity
  • Food Safety/Quality Culture measurement in supplier management
  • Supplier Management Case Histories

Each abstract will be judged based on educational merit. The submission deadline is February 8, 2019.

Shawna Wagner, DNV GL
FST Soapbox

Did You Write “NONE” for Biological, Chemical and Physical Hazards in Your HACCP Plan?

By Shawna Wagner
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Shawna Wagner, DNV GL

Ok, ok I know what you are thinking, another article about HACCP. You have been HACCP certified since 1999 and doing this for years—why read this article? That golden sticker on your certificate does not last forever. Industry has changed, approaches to food safety have changed, and your HACCP plan should have evolved. Did it?

Biological, chemical, physical, biological, chemical, and physical hazards. If you are any part of the quality assurance or HACCP team, you can recite this in your sleep. Do you recite economical and radiological hazards? These are one of the most commonly missed items in a plant’s HACCP plan that I have witnessed when auditing. This, of course, applies only to plants that must comply with FSMA, but does it truly hurt to think about including it in all plants? I mean, we are all in this for food safety, right?!

In speaking about radiological hazards, most of the time I will have site management tell me that I am not by a power plant so there are not hazards to my operations. If you are a producer of vegetables and fruits, or a plant receiving these kinds of ingredients, water and even soil can be a home to radioactive hazards! Radioactive minerals are naturally occurring and unless you know where to start, items such as Cadmium may sneak up on you in unacceptable levels. Economical hazards are, in my opinion, a bit easier to research. When looking at economical hazards, we are basically trying to prevent intentional contamination to gain or profit. In more common terms, this is often referred to as food fraud. Olive oil, fish, and even spices have been known to be the victims of food fraud. There are plenty of informational sites out there to help get you started on writing your hazard analysis for food fraud, however some I have found you do have to pay for.

Another common non-conformance that I see missing in HACCP audits is what I would call inputs and outputs to the HACCP flow chart. Inputs are: Water, compressed air, ice and even steam. Outputs are: Waste, animal feed or by-products. This is not an all-inclusive list, but certainly these examples could bring a new level of hazards to your facility, especially if you did not include them in your hazard analysis. Even worse, if you did include them but decided to write in your hazard analysis that word…dare I even say it… “NONE”: You wrote “none” for biological, chemical, and physical hazards. More than likely you have a pre-requisite program, letter of guarantee, or something that controls these hazards, and you absolutely want to include these in your HACCP plan. Give yourself credit! Auditors and customers alike truly want to see that you have documented and given thought to each of your processing steps. Make sure you take that HACCP flow chart and walk around your facility to ensure you have captured the needed information that will give you the best chance of catching items that can be missed. The plan is only as strong as the time you put into it, which leads me to my next point: Your HACCP or Food Safety Team.

The notorious HACCP team. You have one, the head of the team is the QA manager, and you have team members to cover the multi-disciplinary basis. So, what’s the problem? Well, maybe none, but remember the comment about the golden sticker on your certificate? It’s the same thought process here. Your team must be continually updated and educated to keep up with the ever-changing world of food. That 1999 HACCP certificate is no longer valid in the eyes of some customers. I have seen many customers requiring that HACCP be retrained every five years. For the sites that must follow FSMA rules and regulations, have you completed your Preventative Controls Qualified Individual training? You should have, and who is their backup? It takes much planning and money to make this happen, but it is all a crucial step in maintaining food safety and your HACCP plan.

We all know that our programs and processes are not good for forever and that change is inevitable. There are always avenues for gathering information and accessing it. You must be willing to go out and get the resources that will place an upgrade on your food safety management system, as waiting for it can sometimes cause gaps and non-conformities. The big question is: Did you put in the hours?

Food Safety Consortium

Making Your Supply Chain Smarter, Safer and More Sustainable

By Maria Fontanazza
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Food Safety Consortium

How to build a smarter, safer and more sustainable food supply chain: This was a big topic at the 2018 Food Safety Consortium last month. David McCarthy of IBM Food Trust led a panel of experts from the retail side of the industry in a Q&A session about their biggest challenges in the supply chain, the role of digital and how to achieve a higher level of transparency.

What are the main areas in the supply chain where there’s a major need for improvement?

Sean Leighton, vice president of food safety and quality, Cargill: One of the biggest challenges that I see from a supplier perspective is people’s assumptions around what is the supply chain—our mindsets, our ability to talk with each other on “what do you mean by ‘supply chain’”?

Cindy Jiang and Scott Horsfall at the 2018 Food Safety Consortium
Cindy Jiang and Scott Horsfall (all images credit: amybcreative)

What is food safety’s role in the supply chain?

Cindy Jiang, senior director of worldwide food safety, quality and nutrition, McDonald’s Corp.: The supply chain is a supply network; it’s not linear. The most fundamental thing is to ensure there’s no disruption—that the supply chain can provide goods and food product to your customers. When you’re looking at the supply chain, [there’s a] change between the traditional thinking and the digital demand. How do you provide information in an effective way to your customers?

Howard Popoola, vice president, corporate food technology and regulatory compliance, The Kroger Company: Our supply chain means nothing if we aren’t able to deliver safe foods to those consumers in the last mile. Consumers are thinking about the experience that they’re going to have with this product. They’re not thinking about whether it’s safe or not. They’re thinking about the meal they’re going to make at home with the ingredients that they purchased.

The biggest pain point from the retailer’s perspective, when you look at us as being the last in the chain, is in transparency [and] knowing where the products are coming from. Transparency is very big for us. And it takes more than the retailer to open that door of transparency to the consumer.

What are the challenges you’re seeing in providing transparency?

Scott Horsfall, CEO, California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement: I think a big challenge right now and in the future is communication.

Leighton: I think the winners….are going to be the ones that try to achieve consumer trust. The future is no place for the three ring binders…it’s digital. Where does the data sit? How can you provide access to them through customers?

Howard Popoola, Sean Leighton, Food Safety Consortium
Howard Popoola and Sean Leighton

How does the digital transformation play into providing transparency?

Popoola: The consumers have already trusted the food industry. There are millions of people walking into retail stores buying product. If the trust isn’t there, they wouldn’t be doing that. We erode that trust when [a consumer] has a terrible experience with that product.

How are you seeing digital transformation across the supply chain?

Jiang: Digital is one of the top three initiatives of McDonalds; how do we connect with consumers? When serving 70 million customers each day, how can we get to the transparency to understand the supply—digital is one of the answers. From the supply chain standpoint, we’re looking at the analytics. We cannot think about only one solution. We have to have different solutions to get the end results.

Popoola: I think the food industry has to see itself as a big ecosystem. If we don’t see ourselves as an ecosystem that strives for the one thing,… digital is always going to be a mirage. We have to look at what is digital and understand the fact that [we have large and small companies]. It’s not going to be one size fits all.

How long will it take the food industry to get to a completely digital operation?

Jiang: Looking at the total industry digitized—the majority of the work can be done within the next five years, [by] looking at leading companies. But in terms of total digitalization of the ood network in the U.S., I think that will take another 10 to 20 years.

Food Safety Consortium
(left to right) Howard Poopola, Sean Leighton, Cindy Jiang, Scott Horsfall and David McCarthy discuss supply chain challenges during the 2018 Food Safety Consortium

Horsfall: I think there’s a challenge with much of the farm community to get to this point. There’s also this issue with how you transmit the information. [Horsfall predicts] 10-15 years for the industry.

Leighton: Even a 100% digitized food industry has limited value if the players in the industry can’t pull together to deliver meaningful insights from it all.

What are the most promising innovations solving transparency?

Jiang: When looking at innovation, not just technology (technology is an enabler)— the most impactful innovation is human innovation: How can we work together? The GFSI platform started 20 years ago, and now it’s so impactful around the globe. [Now we’re] looking at how to harmonize food safety standards.

How can we standardize and harmonize… for ingredient suppliers?
How [can we] use the GS1 platform, numbering system to track on where the ingredient is coming from and how that product is made for us—what’s in my product?

Think about the human collaboration and how to improve where we’re at.

Poopola: I would like to tackle this from a different perspective: When we built technologies (whether off-the-shelf or customized) 20 years ago, we thought [it would be around for] the next 100 years. It’s clear today that the technology you have in place might be obsolete in five years. We have to look at the technology we’re building and acquiring today: Will it be relevant in five years?

Leighton: It’s hard to wrap my head around…deep learning and AI [artificial intelligence]. The insights we can gain from machine learning and predictive analytics. Could AI be human’s last invention?

Horsfall: In produce industry, which hasn’t always been in the front, I think that’s changing. [We’re] trying to bring AI and new technology to bear.

Doug Sutton, Steritech
Retail Food Safety Forum

What Attracts Customers to Your Restaurant, and What Could Keep Them Away Forever?

By Doug Sutton
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Doug Sutton, Steritech

The most recent numbers from Black Box Intelligence reflect what has been an ongoing trend for the last several months—improving same store sales. Sounds like great news, right? It could be, if another key metric wasn’t trending in the wrong direction.

Traffic numbers in restaurants are on a very steady down slope. In the third quarter, traffic was down 1.3%, and in October, traffic slowed down by another 2.2%.

The bottom line: Fewer people are dining out, but they’re spending more money.

For now.

Earlier this year, a survey of 500+ consumers asked them several questions about their preferences and experiences when dining out, as well as how they are making their decisions. The results could help restaurant operators adjust their customer experience to help bring more traffic through the door.

Despite Low Traffic Numbers, Americans Still Dine Out Frequently

Consumers have a lot of choice when purchasing a prepared meal these days: Restaurants or prepared foods from a grocery store? Dine in or take out? Fast food, fast casual, or full-service dining? The list goes on and on.

Sixty percent of the above-mentioned survey takers had dined at a restaurant, whether sit-in or delivery, once a week or more frequently. Another 25% reported doing the same two to three times a month.

But there is stiff competition.

Nearly 70% of the same group has purchased prepared foods (pre-made sushi, fried chicken, sandwiches, etc.) at a grocery or convenience store in the last month, indicating that the convenience of prepared foods is taking root in American life. This is an increase from a similar survey conducted in 2016, when slightly more than 65% of respondents said they had purchased a prepared meal from these sources.

What Are Customers Really Looking for in a Restaurant?

It should come as no surprise, that the driving factor for choosing a restaurant is the quality of the food. Respondents of this survey were provided a list of 10 areas of food safety and operational items to choose from and asked them to choose up to five that matter to them most when choosing a restaurant. Food quality and taste was the frontrunner by far, but restaurant cleanliness was second.

The third item on the list might surprise people. It wasn’t speed of service, or order accuracy, or service quality—while they all do matter to customers, it’s their previous experience with a location or chain that matters most.

When Customers Want Answers about a Restaurant, They Go Online

Social media and online reviews are playing an increasingly important role in how customers share their experiences with restaurants. The news about social media and online review sites is good for restaurants. If you’re doing a good job with your customer experience, your customers are willing to talk about it.

Respondents were extremely likely to use social media to share a restaurant experience on a social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram: 58%, said they would be very or somewhat likely to share a restaurant experience on social media. Even better news? Among those who fell into these two categories, nearly two-thirds say they are more likely to share a positive experience than a negative one.

The same holds true for online restaurant review sites, such as Yelp! And OpenTable. While fewer customers say they are very or somewhat likely to share their experience on an online restaurant review site, 49% of those who use review sites once again say that a positive experience is more likely to garner a review than a negative one. A full 66% of those who would be likely to use an online review site are likely to post a positive experience over a negative one.

Especially in the case of online restaurant review sites, this is important. Why? Because nearly three-quarters of respondents sometimes or often use restaurant review sites to help select where they will dine. Among those respondents, the online review carries significant weight in making their decision. Nearly 25% say online reviews are extremely or very influential in their dining decisions, while another 41% qualified them as moderately influential.

Delivery Problems and Who Customers Blame

Most restaurant operators know that there are big dollars to be had in the delivery space. But, the results of this survey indicate that restaurants have a bit of work to do.

Well over half (58.9%) of those surveyed had ordered food for delivery in the six months before the survey. Of those, nearly 30% experienced a problem with their order: Food being cold, wrong food, took too long to deliver the food, etc.

Here’s the important takeaway for restaurants offering delivery: Whether you manage delivery yourself or use a third-party delivery service, customers that experience problems place the fault squarely on the restaurant. Among those that experienced a delivery problem, 79.55% say the restaurant was to blame. That’s important because with third-party delivery service, the restaurant does lose some control over time it takes to deliver, food security, and more.

Foodborne Illness Outbreaks Have a Long-term Effect on Revenue

A 2018 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health put a price tag on foodborne illness outbreaks for restaurants: Anywhere from $4,000 up to $1.9 million wrapped up in “lost revenue, fines, lawsuits, legal fees, insurance premium increases, inspection costs and staff retraining.”

The survey results discussed in this article show that the effects of a foodborne illness outbreak could linger for much longer than anyone truly realizes.

Nearly 30% of respondents said they would never eat at that location if they knew a foodborne illness outbreak had happened there; 24% said they would stay away for between one to six months, and another 18% said they would stay away for six months to a year.

The responses get more dramatic when chain restaurants have foodborne illness incidents. When asked if they would avoid eating at other locations in the chain if a single location was involved in an outbreak, more than 31% said yes, and a whopping 50% say maybe. The majority of respondents would give the chain a second shot, however. Only 19% say they’d never eat at any location in the chain again; more than half (over 58%) report that they would only stay away for between one month and one year.

If multiple locations of a chain are involved, the percentage of respondents that would avoid eating at other locations in the chain more than doubled to more than 68%. The bulk of those who would stop eating at other locations in the chain (31%) say they’d never eat at the chain again, while another 18.5% would avoid the chain for longer than a year. Another 23% say they’d stay away for six months to one year.

Customer Experience Investments Can Reap Big Rewards

This survey revealed plenty of other details about what customers are looking for—what cleanliness factors drive them crazy, what they think of health department scores (and which groups are really paying attention), what really turns them off when they read it in a review—but the real takeaway is this: Restaurants willing to invest in customer experience and a culture of food safety will reap the rewards from customers.

Lettuce

Latest on E. Coli Outbreak Involving Romaine Lettuce

By Food Safety Tech Staff
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Lettuce

Yesterday FDA issued an update on the E.coli O157:H7 outbreak linked to romaine lettuce grown in California. The agency’s traceback investigation continues, and it is working with the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) and Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), as there is a similar outbreak in Canada.

FDA stated that the contaminated lettuce likely originates from the Central Coast growing regions of northern and Central California (Counties of Monterey, San Benito, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz and Ventura).

“Traceback information from four restaurants in three different states so far has implicated 10 different distributors, 12 different growers, and 11 different farms as potential sources of rthe contaminated lettuce. The information indicates that the outbreak cannot be explained by a single farm, grower, harvester, or distributor.”

FDA’s latest update states that 52 illnesses and 19 hospitalizations have been reported across 15 states (the highest cases are in California and New Jersey with 11 illnesses each).

Earlier updates:

(UPDATE) CDC Alert: Do Not Eat Romaine Lettuce, Throw It Out

Mahni Ghorashi, Clear Labs
FST Soapbox

Why the Food Safety Industry Needs the Cloud

By Mahni Ghorashi
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Mahni Ghorashi, Clear Labs

Cloud computing and storage, the breakthrough technology that once dominated headlines, conferences and CIOs’ strategic plans, is now commonplace in most industries. That is not to discount the journey it took to get here, though. This easy acceptance wasn’t always the case, and in fact, some of the world’s most important industries are lagging behind.

Food safety is one such industry that stands to gain the most from adopting cloud technology but continues to rely heavily on manual processes, paperwork, and cumbersome on-premise databases. These methods are seen as fail-safe, proven by history to be effective enough and compatible with the overarching goals of the industry. We’re suffering from the age-old adage: If it isn’t broken, we don’t need to fix it.

While the food safety industry has good reasons for taking a more conservative approach to new technology, I’d argue that the most pressing risk to our industry is the failure to invest in innovation. In our own attempts to avoid risk, we’re actually exposing ourselves to far greater losses both in protecting consumers and new opportunities.

A Path Forward For Food Safety

The food safety industry is changing, and changing rapidly. However, despite advances, the industry still faces major challenges. We’ve seen more than 200 recalls just this year. An average recall costs $10 million dollars in direct costs alone. On average, it takes 57 days to recall food, according to a report by the Office of Inspector General.

At the same time, we’re beginning to generate more data than ever, with technologies like blockchain and next-generation sequencing coming online in a big way. We’re about to experience a data explosion arguably bigger than in any other industry. A single NGS test can give industry officials hundreds of millions of data points per analysis, and routine pathogen tests are happening at high volumes around the clock.

This amount of data cannot be contained in the spreadsheets and on-premise databases of today.

The hesitation to adopt cloud-computing is not unfounded, given the initial fear around outages and security, and a disbelief that the technology could ever be as reliable and secure as their existing systems. And the hesitation is even more understandable when you consider that food and beverage is the third-most hacked industry. The damage from these breaches can be extensive, with reports that 70% of hacked food and beverage companies go out of business within a year of an attack. There is a substantial cost for lax security or prolonged outages.

Clearly, any solution has to be comprehensive, and our justifications for switching systems have to be all the more clear. But we cannot as an industry sit idle.

The food safety industry has an opportunity to learn from those who have gone before us and build a stronger, more robust cloud infrastructure.

We’re starting to see this shift take place – some of the top poultry manufacturers have already made the leap into cloud computing. They and others will prove that the value of making the move far outweighs the risk.

Quality Control and Consistency

Right now, it’s not uncommon for food safety employees to record their observations via paper and pencil. In a best-case scenario, these professionals are forced into spreadsheets with limited interoperability. In either scenario, there are huge amounts of friction when it comes to sharing information and, in fact, data can easily be lost as inboxes fill, software crashes, or papers get buried in the shuffle.

By enabling instantaneous data sharing, the cloud makes collaboration across an organization easily accessible for the first time. This, in turn, boosts productivity and also guarantees a higher degree of consistency in both process and results.

Employees can instantly share results, communicate across departments, and easily control permissions and access to information, allowing others to iterate on or apply their findings in real time.

Speed Across an Organization

The drive to increase efficiency actually underwrites the entire food safety industry. Experts are constantly asking how we can be faster at assessing risk, managing recalls, and generally running a business. These questions are only becoming more important as the threat of foodborne illness continues to rise.

The cloud enables greater speed in tracking food information inside and outside of the lab. Perhaps more than any other tool, cloud technology is going to allow the food safety industry to more quickly and effectively manage recalls.

Technology that allows companies to immediately update information company-wide without the burden or drag of an unwieldy IT infrastructure is valuable. Technology that gives you easily interpretable results, so that you can make quick decisions for the good of public health safety is valuable.

Cloud technology enables both. You could easily process terabytes worth of data and spit out easy, comprehensible results that would have otherwise taken days or weeks to produce.

This ability, which on its own is attractive, is especially important as you get into more complicated pathogen tests. For example, with traditional serotyping, a substantial portion of calls are subjective. The speed of cloud computing can take away some of that guesswork.

Dramatic Cost Savings

Not only does the cloud offer a faster system for storing and accessing information, but it also offers cheaper infrastructure, usually an offshoot of its speed. A survey of more than 1,000 IT professionals found that 88% of cloud users pointed to cost savings and 56% agreed that cloud services had helped them boost profits. Additionally, the absolute cost of the cloud is continuing to drop, improving margins.

With the cost savings enabled by the cloud, the food safety lab no longer has to stay a cost center. Adopting cloud technologies can create more wiggle room in a company’s budget and free up resources for ambitious experiments, new product development, and other activities that contribute to the bottom line of the organization.

Security and Regulatory Advancements

The cloud also allows companies to more easily cooperate with HAACP and FSMA regulations. With all of this organizational data easily available and updated in real time, organizations can ensure they’re keeping pace with regulatory requirements by easily producing traceability records and managing compliance requirements across multiple locations and vendors, for example.

While better, more transparent data management company-wide has always been the draw of cloud, the technology has been crippled by simultaneous concerns about security. Food safety executives feel stuck between wanting to comply with best practices and needing to protect sensitive and valuable information.

Fortunately, food safety has waited long enough. Even as recently as 2015, cloud breaches of major organizations’ databases were still making headlines. However, the technology has come a long way in a short time. Cloud providers are beginning to implement automatic checks of systems to analyze threats and identify their severity.

These advancements speak to the food safety industry’s primary pain points, security and speed. By solving for both, the cloud has reached a maturity worthy of the food safety industry.

The Future: Data Pollination

Finally, the cloud makes it much easier to share data across departments, organizations, and even entire industries.

We’re entering an era of data pollination. What I mean by that is there an opportunity to mesh food safety data (genomic data, label information, etc.) with other forms of data—human microbiome data, for instance, to create “personalized” food, enabling consumers to eat ideal foods based on their genetic makeup. While this trend has already taken off, it could be further improved and better validated by bringing food and genetic data out of their silos.

On the opposite end of the production line, data pollination could also help farmers, who have huge amounts of data at their fingertips, understand how they can play a larger role in food safety. If data can enable farmers to produce bigger yields, data can also certainly help farmers prevent any environmental causes of food safety on the farm itself.

Bringing together the data from the entire lifecycle of food—from farmer to consumer—can only be a good thing, powered by the cloud.

Conclusion

The food industry should not look at the task of updating their infrastructure to the cloud as a burden or an extra cost—it’s an investment and when done right, it can provide far greater returns. We have the advantage of late adoption and learning from the implementation mistakes and successes.

This isn’t just incremental improvement territory—we’re talking about making a quantum leap forward in our industry.

Alert

JBS Recalls More than 12 Million Pounds of Raw Beef, May Be Contaminated with Salmonella

By Food Safety Tech Staff
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Alert

Following an expanded recall issued this week, JBS Tolleson, Inc. has now recalled about 12,093,271 pounds of non-intact raw beef products over concerns that they may be contaminated with Salmonella Newport. The initial recall of nearly 7 million raw beef products occurred just two months ago. The Class I recall announced today involves an additional 5,156,076 pounds of raw beef products that were produced and packed between July 26 and September 7, 2018, according to USDA’s FSIS . The recalled products have the establishment number “EST. 267” inside the USDA mark of inspection.

According to the CDC, there are currently 246 reported Salmonella Newport illnesses across 25 states, with 59 hospitalizations. No deaths have been reported. FSIS and CDC have been working with case patients who have provided receipts or shopper card numbers to conduct traceback investigations. The agencies are urging consumers to check their freezers for any recalled product.