Food safetyTraceability key to food safety
The produce industry looks at food safety and traceability as the key to reducing the instances of food-borne illnesses; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has launched its own effort to protect the integrity of the food supply with the Food Safety Modernization Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law 4 January
Food traceability experiences renewed interest // Source: labelingnews.com
The produce industry looks at food safety and traceability as the key to reducing the instances of food-borne illnesses. In the last three months we have witnessed food-borne illness outbreaks traced to cantaloupe shipped from the Rocky Ford region of Colorado in late July and strawberries from Oregon in early August.
“Each is unfortunate, but it’s another commodity group that’s said ‘it could never happen to us,’ and it suddenly becomes aware that maybe it could,” Chris Davis, chief operating officer with RedLine Solutions Inc., a Santa Clara, California-based provider of traceability software and hardware products, told the Packer.
“The incident with strawberries in Oregon, strawberry growers were thinking, ‘we hadn’t had a food safety incident in a long time,’ and after that incident, it moved them right up to the top of the FDA’s list.”
The Packer notes that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) already has launched its own effort to protect the integrity of the food supply with the Food Safety Modernization Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law 4 January.
