October 2020 Food News
Prepared by the Food Industry Employment Program
October to me always means harvest time. Growing up that meant hours of peeling, coring and cooking apples from my parents trees. Additionally it meant sunny days outside kicking leaves and looking for horse chestnuts which in Britain we call conkers.
If you are preparing food from the harvest, please make sure you understand how to make your final product safe. If you have any food safety questions, please reach out.
FDA Traceability Guidelines
The biggest challenge with food outbreak is making sure that news of the recall reaches all consumers. This is hard with a diverse food system as we need to trace back to the producer and then forward to all customers and consumers. Technology can help if we all have access to the same infrastructure.
The onus is shifting from the farmer to the distributor and processor as shown in last months' release of the FDA’s Proposed Rule for Food Traceability. This rule means that even small food manufacturers, handlers and processors need to keep records especially if they are a first receiver of ingredients and farm produce. The FDA recommends that for foods on the “Food Traceability List” Key Data Elements (KDEs) are collected at Critical Tracking Events (CTEs), such as growing, receiving, creating, transforming and shipping.
What data is collected depends on which CTE you are monitoring, the product and it is recommended that this is captured at a batch/lot level. Examples of records that need to be kept for different products both on the Food Traceability List and not, are provided by the FDA here.
The purpose of collecting this information is to help the manufacturer and the FDA to quickly trace the source of the outbreak when there is a food safety investigation. The quicker we can find the source, the less people affected by the outbreak.
This article summarizes the proposed rule. This guidance is still under public comments, so if you are concerned and interested, please make sure to comment.
For small and mid sized food manufacturers, this ruling will mean that if you buy food directly from a farmer that is on the food traceability list, you must start a record chain! There are many exemptions, especially if you process with a kill step and others. Not sure what records to keep? Book a free food safety coaching call today and let me help!
Quality Assurance, Quality Control, and Food Safety
I wrote a series of posts about food safety and food quality explaining why it is important to define what we mean by different terms. That way we are assured that we are all talking about the same thing and our co-workers understand our product specifications. These specifications and definitions then become part of your QA & QC program.
If you haven't read these posts yet, I hope you enjoy them and please let me know in the comments of the posts what you think and if you have any more questions.
Food Industry Employment Program News
We are still going through our branding and focussing process. I am learning a lot about marketing and about the food industry as it pertains to me business. I am also learning a lot about me and why I do what I do. I will be sharing some of this learning in further newsletters and blog posts.
If you like what you read here, please check out our daily Food Crumb which has short snippets of food safety and food systems news. No more searching through Facebook or LinkedIn to find my daily posts.
All the best,
Cathy