Tag Archives: Jack in the box

By Tyler Williams

Chicken producers and processors must always pay close attention to listeria and E. coli. Their regulated to-market protocols incorporate intense testing and cleaning standards that help ensure the people who buy chicken sandwiches at fast casual restaurants, chicken fingers at sporting arenas and trays of fresh chicken legs at supermarkets don’t get sick.

The companies stay on top of listeria and E. coli because the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has considered them “adulterants,” or substances that should not be found in meat products, for decades. The federal agency banned listeria in 1987, and in 1994 listed E. coli as an adulterant in the wake of an E. coli outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants that sickened 700 people in four states, and led to 171 hospitalizations and four deaths.

All along, however, another prominent bacteria, Salmonella, remained unregulated, despite its proclivity for making people ill—more than a 1.3 million cases of salmonellosis appear in the U.S. every year, leading to about 26,500 hospitalizations and roughly 400 deaths. It is the No. 1 cause for foodborne illness in the U.S., and most cases stem from chicken products.

But earlier this year the USDA announced that it now plans to consider Salmonella an adulterant in some chicken products. The matter is out for public comment now; if the USDA doesn’t change its clear intention to regulate Salmonella, federal food inspectors soon will be testing for it in select chicken products.

The chicken industry opposes the measure. In a news release issued shortly after the FSIS’ August announcement, the National Chicken Council (NCC) pointed toward the 1957 Poultry Products Inspection Act, which did not include Salmonella as an adulterant, as a set of standards worth upholding today.

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Well, a lot has changed in industrial agriculture during the past 65 years, and that includes a dramatic expansion of chicken farming and consumption across the country. In the 1950s, the average American ate about 16 pounds of chicken a year, compared to 56 pounds of beef and 50 pounds of pork. But by this year, Americans were eating close to 112 pounds of chicken a year, along with 56 pounds of beef and 50 pounds of pork. In terms of meat consumption, chicken now rules the roost. Regulating it might not have been necessary back when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. But today I believe it most definitely is.

As a professional in the food safety industry, I champion the FSIS’ decision. It’s about time the agency added Salmonella to its list of adulterants; the bacteria causes far too much illness and death in the U.S. every year. Many of those cases could have been prevented through regulatory oversight.

Addressing Poultry Industry Concerns

It is true, as opponents of the proposed regulation argue, that Salmonella doesn’t always emerge in the processing plant; humans can inadvertently introduce the bacteria in their own kitchens. Why, the industry asks, should it be penalized for conditions outside of its control? In addition, proper cooking methods will kill Salmonella. If people don’t follow cooking directions on the packages of chicken they buy, and get sick from Salmonella as a result, the chicken industry believes it should not be held accountable.

On the first issue, it is unlikely that cases revolving around individual consumers introducing Salmonella to their chicken products would ever lead to penalties. Federal regulators scrutinize public health data for clusters of outbreaks, which often point toward entire product lines being infected with bacteria; isolated one-off cases, many of which indeed could be the result of human error, do not concern them.

For the second point, yes, people should read labels and closely follow cooking directions. But in my opinion, that is irrelevant; dangerous levels of Salmonella simply should not dwell in foods, and it’s the job of regulators to make sure food is safe.

Toy manufacturers, for example, must eliminate choking hazards from products designed for kids under 3 years, thanks to federal regulations. It shouldn’t be up to parents to constantly monitor their toddlers while they play with toys, to ensure they don’t gag on something potentially dangerous found on the stuffed giraffe.

Should the rule become policy, the FSIS will focus on just one category: stuffed, breaded and raw chicken products. These products, including dishes like chicken Kiev and chicken cordon bleu, often are heat-treated to set the batter or breading, but are not fully cooked. They have been associated with 14 outbreaks and about 200 illnesses since 1998.

This represents a solid start. Next, I’d like to see the FSIS pursue regulating Salmonella in other chicken products. Even if the agency doesn’t, however, many processors will have to implement new practices and testing procedures for all of their products anyway, as in many cases it won’t make sense to just incorporate new protocols within a few discrete product lines. Among other things, I would anticipate boosted commitments among producers and processors to cleaning and sanitation processes, environmental monitoring (probably the most important pursuit) and overall facility food safety measures.

Will this action by the FSIS completely eliminate Salmonella from the targeted products? Absolutely not. The rule sets a maximum threshold for Salmonella in the food the agency tests; in many cases, chicken products that contain negligible amounts of the bacteria will still make it to market. It’s just products containing dangerous amounts of Salmonella that will be subject to penalties.

Food safety serves as one of the foundations of a healthy society. It also reinforces and bolsters public trust in the products consumers buy, which nurtures and strengthens the entire food industry. With this proposed Salmonella rule by the USDA, the U.S. takes another important step toward ensuring the health of its citizens, and further enhancing consumer trust in the chicken products they buy.

Steven Sklare, USP, Aaron Biros, Food Safety Tech

December 13, 2017

A Watershed in Food Safety

By Food Safety Tech Staff

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David Theno was scheduled to speak at this year’s Food Safety Consortium during a special session recognizing the 1993 Jack in the Box E.coli outbreak as a breakthrough moment in food safety. His untimely passing changed the course of discussion at the event to a reflection on Theno’s legacy and the significant changes that the industry has gone through over the past 25 years.

In the following video, Steven Sklare, director of customer engagement, foods program at USP, shares his thoughts on the importance of having an appreciation for what the industry went through in 1993 and the significant impact it had on the how the industry has changed since then.

What events in food safety do you think have had the most impact over the last 25 years? Share in the comments below the video.

August 17, 2017

Food Safety Over Past 25 Years: ‘Everything Has Changed’

By Maria Fontanazza

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The effect that the 1993 E. coli O157:H7 outbreak had on the food industry was tremendous. Responsible for more than 600 illnesses and the deaths of four children, the outbreak led to significant changes in the industry’s approach to food safety. “[It] drove a shift in food safety that many had been working toward for years,” said Rima Khabbaz, M.D., acting deputy director for infectious diseases at CDC during the “We Were There” CDC lecture series, adding that the focus moved to food suppliers and how they could make their products safer. “The outbreak drove a paradigm shift that opened the door to food safety,” said Patricia Griffin, M.D., chief of the CDC’s enteric diseases epidemiology branch during the lecture.

Deirdre Schlunegger and Michael Taylor — Deirdre Schlunegger, CEO of Stop Foodborne Illness, and Michael Taylor at Stop event celebrating Food Safety Heroes during the 2015 Food Safety Consortium.

Within a few years, several actions and initiatives paved the way for notable progress. In 1994, Mike Taylor, who was administrator of USDA’s FSIS at the time, made a speech that “shocked and outraged the industry,” said Griffin, where he stated, “we consider raw ground beef that is contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 to be adulterated within the meaning of the Federal Meat Inspection Act.” From there, the USDA worked on the first major advance in meat regulation. In 1996 the agency established the Pathogen Reduction Rule to improve meat inspection. The same year CDC’s PulseNet was born, the nationwide lab network that uses DNA fingerprinting to help identify outbreaks early, along with the Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet), an epidemiological system that tracks incidents and trends related to food.

In a Q&A with Food Safety Tech, Mike Taylor, most recently the former FDA commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, discusses the dramatic change that industry has undergone during the past 25 years, from FSMA to technology advancements to food safety culture.

Food Safety Past, Present and Future at the 2017 Food Safety Consortium: Recognizing the 1993 Jack In the Box E. coli outbreak as the event that propelled the current food safety movement. Mike Taylor, Bill Marler, Esq. and Ann Marie McNamara (Target Corp.), who took the reins from the late David Theno at Jack In the Box, will discuss Theno’s impact on the industry. The session continues through a timeline of the evolution of food safety from 1993 to present, and then the future, where we will cover the IoT, social media, food safety culture and technology. It will be followed by the STOP Foodborne Illness Award Ceremony. Wednesday, November 29, 2017, 4:00–5:30 pm | LEARN MORE

Food Safety Tech: Reflecting on how far the industry has come since the E.coli O157:H7 outbreak involving Jack in the Box in 1993, what key areas of progress have been made since?

Michael Taylor: I think there are very major ones obviously. You have to remember where things were when the Jack-in-the-Box [outbreak] happened. We were in a place where USDA programs said it was not responsible for pathogens in raw meat and that consumers are supposed to cook the product; [and] industry was operating under traditional methods. Microbial methods were typically conducted for quality not for safety; you had the loss of public confidence and a terrible situation in which consumers were pointing at industry, and industry was pointing at consumers, and no one was taking clear responsibility for safety of the product.

Now we are in a completely different environment where not only is there clarity about industry’s responsibility for monitoring pathogens, there’s also been enormous progress by industry to put in place microbial testing, something David Theno pioneered and is now a central part of food safety management systems for meat safety.

Everything has changed.

These [institutional] arrangements exist not only in the meat industry, but now across the whole food industry. There’s the emergence of GFSI taking responsibility for managing the supply chain for food safety, food safety culture taking hold broadly across leading companies in the industry, and FSMA codifying for 80% of the food supply that FDA regulates the principles of risk-based prevention and continuous improvement on food safety.

I think it’s rather dramatic how far the industry’s food safety regulatory system has come since [the] Jack in the Box [outbreak].

FST: How has FSMA helped to align industry priorities?

Taylor: Let’s focus on the events first leading up to FSMA—for example, the outbreaks or illnesses associated with leafy greens [and] peanut butter, and problems with imported products—those events in the world aligned industry priorities around the need to modernize the food safety laws and to enact FSMA. It was the coming together of industry and consumer interests, and the expert community around the principles of comprehensive risk-based prevention that vaporized into FSMA. Now FSMA is the framework within which companies are organizing their food safety systems in accordance with these modern principles of prevention.

And clearly what’s been codified in FSMA and some of the key elements are becoming organizing principles where industry is aligning our priorities for food safety. Environmental monitoring where that’s an appropriate verification control for a company’s hygiene and pathogen control—that’s clearly a priority that folks are aligning on. The issue of supplier verification for domestic and foreign supply is a priority that has been elevated by FSMA, and so has the whole issue of training and employee capacity, whether it’s in processing facilities or on farms, as well as food safety culture. If you’re going to be effectively preventive you need to deal with the human dimension of your food safety system.

These are examples of ways in which FSMA is aligning industry priorities.

Read the rest of the interview on page 2 (link below).

Pages: 1 2

Addressing Poultry Industry Concerns

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