Technology is central to the success (or even existence) of FDA’s food tracking and tracing pilot currently underway as part of FSMA’s new authority grant to the Agency.  If you have not read our first blog about the pilot conducted by FDA and IFT please read that here now.  What the statute accurately communicates but vastly underestimates is the difficulty and scale of the role of technology in the successful development of the program.   Sec. 204 2(B) of FSMA states that FDA … READ MORE

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently unveiled a new pilot program studying tracking and tracing technologies for high-risk foods. The pilot is contemplated in Sec. 204 of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), a legislative initiative aiming at reducing foodborne outbreaks and increasing the FDA’s ability to quickly identify and report outbreaks to the American public. In a post on the FDA’s Transparency Blog, Sherri McGarry, Senior Adviser, Coordinated Outbreak Response and Evaluation Network Office of Foods at FDA, communicated her view of the importance of this pilot; “When a foodborne outbreak occurs, it is up to … READ MORE

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Recent statements from the CDC regarding food safety trends and statistics have been wildly reductionist and inconclusive. But they do provide us with hints about the future direction of federal government thinking with respect to managing food safety risks: Food tracking and supply chain tracing.

Enter the Digital Database Savior

“We need better – and more – information about what foods are causing outbreaks and where those foods are coming from,” said Hannah Gould, CDC epidemiologist, in a recent presentation. “Knowing more … READ MORE

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On September 11th 2011, Cargill recalled an additional 185,000 pounds of ground turkey citing a potential contamination risk of Salmonella Heidelberg.  This recall follows the previous massive recall of 36 million pounds of ground turkey products on August 3rd.  In our blog post discussing the first turkey recall we predicted that Cargill would meticulously invest in research and backtracking to understand how the contamination occurred.  As predicted, Cargill has assembled an outside panel of experts to do this very thing.  After discussing their already implemented food safety procedures Cargill states that, “we believe a panel of independent experts will … READ MORE

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36 million pounds of ground turkey. 

That’s a ton of meat, 18,000 tons of meat to be precise. That’s the weight of 120 million brand-new iphones (without the box).  So if almost everyone in Japan bought an iphone-4 today and then put them all on a scale, that’s how much the recalled turkey meat would weigh.

Confused yet? Good.

An importer or manufacturer goes through this same kind of mental trauma every second of every day during a recall or … READ MORE

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