|
 Food Safety Leadership Council
Calling All Produce Executives Who Work Heavily With Foodservice reintroduced to our readers the Food Safety Leadership Council, which was established years ago. The group only sprung into real action after the spinach crisis and the Buyer-led Food Safety Initiative, and now it is designing standards that the National Restaurant Association will unveil at month’s end. The NRA is lining up 25-30 major chains to endorse these standards sight unseen! Produce people in foodservice-related organizations must tell the NRA this whole thing is on the wrong schedule and ask them to work with the suppliers. 3/14/2007
What Is Wal-Mart’s Role In the New NRA Food Safety Standards? … continued our reporting of the Food Safety Leadership Council’s new food safety requirements for fresh produce. The plan is for NRA to adopt these standards as its own and then unveil them at a conference in Monterey at the end of March. The plan could blow up in everyone’s face, and the Pundit has three reasons why. 3/15/2007
Food Safety ‘Arms War’ Claimed As WGA Responds To Publix’ Demand For ‘Enhanced’ Produce Standards discussed Publix announcing its desire for vendors to follow Food Safety Leadership Council standards and the Western Growers Association’s challenge of the new FLSC On-Farm Produce Standards as unreasonable, excessive and scientifically indefensible. Here is a pretty good rule: Associations should try to avoid issuing public attacks on private companies — especially if the private companies are customers. 11/13/2007
Coalition Of Associations Seeks Dialog With Food Safety Leadership Council reported that United, in response to pleas by some of its members, has led a campaign for a collective response to the On-Farm Produce Standards and has issued a far more temperate letter to the Food Safety Leadership Council. The new joint letter points out concerns with the FSLC metrics, the importance of the whole supply chain working together, and requests a meeting. 11/15/2007
Letters Bring Broader Issues To Surface expanded on the new joint produce association letter to the Food Safety Leadership Council (FSLC), which is much better than the one sent by WGA, and raises some broader issues that the produce industry needs to reflect upon: minimum standards, all commodity/all geography standards and mandatory federal regulation. 11/15/2007
Are Buyers Willing To Pay More And Partner With Vendors For Food Safety? established that what the Food Safety Leadership Council companies must understand is that they can add whatever standards they choose to the base one, but they can’t expect farmers to make these investments without a commitment on the buyer’s part to give the business to those who meet these standards. 11/15/2007
WGA’s Primal Scream… And Dirty Glasses showed that there is the real sense that buying organizations have plucked out of the food safety realm one aspect — field and packing conditions — and ignored the fact that they play a role in ensuring food safety as well. 11/16/2007
Back Channel Discussions On The Food Safety Leadership Council discovered several points about Council member’s enforcement of FSLC standards. Legal is behind a lot of this, supermarket CEOs are bitterly angry at the FSLC member companies, and the idea of one standard won’t survive. Quiet discussions will likely result in some changes. However, those companies that have requested vendor commitments to FSLC standards are not withdrawing those requests. 11/16/2007
Pundit’s Mailbag — Welcome To The World Of Retail-Imposed Standards heard from several of our friends in the United Kingdom, where it has been retailers that have led the drive to impose food safety standards on the production end of the business. Their take on the FSLC was that of empathy for the growers, as they have already been through this. 11/16/2007
Cutting Through The Agendas: What’s A Buyer To Do? our pieces on the Food Safety Leadership Council brought to the fore the issue of the role of buyers in establishing food safety standards. Our latest pieces have also brought this thoughtful letter from a long-time force in produce retailing. Our correspondent’s letter is pointed and his experience is substantial, so these are arguments that must be paid substantial attention. Although we are concerned about marketing food safety to the consumer, by working through some sort of retail consortium, which the Food Safety Leadership Council may be the genesis of, there is much less likelihood of this happening in an irresponsible manner. 11/21/2007
Some Food Safety Leadership Council Members Back Down On Demands … surely we can all agree that it is neither necessary nor productive for buyers to issue dictates to long-term, loyal suppliers. Now we’re getting word that some of the companies that had sent out letters demanding suppliers to conform to the new Food Safety Leadership Council standards are giving a reprieve. 11/30/2007
Industry Education Efforts Moderate The Damage, But The Media Can’t Resist EWG’s Annual ‘Dirty Dozen’ Stunt revisits the annual stunt that is the “Dirty Dozen” report. It purports to identify the produce items that have the most pesticide residues on them and is self-evidently silly as it does not purport to actually measure risk of any kind. We would say that the actions of the produce industry have, in fact, both made EWG a little more temperate in its claims and made the media a tad more skeptical – even if the headline is close to irresistible and so the industry has a long way to go. The sadness here is that plenty of consumers, unable or unwilling to get into the gritty details, are likely to read the headline, say a Pox on both conventional and organic, and buy their kids cookies or candy bars instead of apples for their lunch box. 7/6/2011
E. coli Special Report Translated Into French mentions that from time to time we’ve been fortunate to hear from experts overseas that they have found our work sufficiently valuable to merit translation to allow for a wider audience. We are always humbled by these requests for permission to translate. Now, we are pleased to report that our Special Report, As The European E. coli 0104:H4 Outbreak Causes Illness And Death, It Wreaks Havoc On The Produce Trade And Breaks Confidence In Public Health: Lessons From Europe, has also been translated by Albert Amgar and Process Alimentaire. 7/6/2011
Costco’s Finished Product Testing May Do More To Satisfy Advocacy Groups Than To Minimize Food Safety Risks points out that high level retail executives have to deal in a real-world environment that includes regulatory pressure, demands of advocacy groups and actual food safety concerns. It is in the navigation through all this that one finds the explanation for Costco’s decision to require finished product testing on produce and explains why the industry, especially the fresh-cut sector, sees ominous clouds ahead in terms of requirements for testing that will involve massive expenditures and little, if any, return in terms of food safety. 8/3/2011
How Will Your Employees Do On The Summer Food Safety Quiz? finds that with summer here, Lisa Franzen-Castle, a University of Nebraska Extension Nutrition Specialist, and Alice Henneman an Extension Educator, have come up with a slide show quiz, titled, Test Your Summer Food Safety Savvy! This slideshow is based on an earlier work titled, ‘What’s Your Summer Food Safety IQ’ by Diane Van of USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. Useful for everyone and, perhaps, retailers might want to consider posting it on their own websites. 8/3/2011
Pundit’s Mailbag — Del Monte Fresh’s Lawsuit Against FDA Draws Attention To Other Mistakes And Policy Flaws our piece, Del Monte Fresh Stands Up To FDA’s Bullying Tactics, brought this word of support from Clark MacDonald, Deputy General Manager of Frutesa Tropicales De Guatemala. Clark recalls a similar situation several years ago over Guatemalan raspberries. The issue is whether the use of Import Alerts to ban shipments into the US from particular companies is a sensible strategy to deal with food safety concerns. The FDA should just assume that episodic food safety incidents will occur and focus instead on high standards of preventive action. 9/12/2011
THE CANTALOUPE CRISIS The Truth That Dare Not Speak Its Name: The Priority Can Be Safe or The Priority Can Be Local, But It Cannot Be Both finds that it is, of course, horribly sad that 18 people have died in the Multistate Outbreak of Listeriosis Linked to Whole Cantaloupes from Jensen Farms, Colorado. Yet, we would say it is not shocking. We also would say that whatever the specific cause of this outbreak, the more general cause is the local food movement. More specifically, the willingness of large buyers to waive food safety standards so they can buy regionally. 10/4/2011
Pundit’s Mailbag — Closer Look At Auditing Process May Require Rationale For Each Component Of The Audit our piece, Auditing and Food Safety, brought this note from a longtime Pundit contributor Bob Sanderson of Jonathan’s Sprouts. Bob raises a very good point. Very often, people require audits because they want things safe, because they wish to mitigate liability and because it may be required by law, regulation or clientele. Very frequently, they really don’t know what is being audited or why. They just know they need an audit. 2/9/2012
Government User Fees And The Inherent Conflict Of Interest They Create observes how with all the severe fiscal problems government at all levels is experiencing, there is a temptation to impose lots of user fees on industry. In fact, it is hard to imagine how the Food Safety Bill that President Obama pushed will ever be funded without substantial user fees. There is just no budget for all the inspections called for in the law. Yet user fees create a horrible conflict of interest for regulatory agencies. 2/20/2012
Could There Be Common Ground Between The Spinach Crisis And The Cantaloupe Catastrophe? Might Both Have Been Sourced From Transitional Acreage? discovered that there seem to be quite substantial indications that Jensen Farms was sourcing product from a transitional operation. If so, this would indeed be a curious coincidence in that it would create an exceptional commonality between the spinach crisis and the cantaloupe crisis in that, in both cases, the product was sourced from transitional ground. Of course, and here is the rub, it may not be a coincidence at all. There might be causal links in both situations. 2/27/2012
Marketing Gone Wild: The Use And Abuse Of Food Safety ‘Certifications’ states that the produce industry has come to work so hard on food safety. But each company and the industry as a whole has to make sure the marketing efforts don’t get ahead of themselves. Particularly, those who offer seals or indicias or who use them in their marketing have a responsibility to make sure that these are not misused to imply things that are not justified. We check out a lot of industry web sites and we find these seals are often misused. The most obvious and most egregious problem here is the use of PMA’s Gold Circle in this fashion.2/27/2012
FDA, Stealth Recalls, Public Health And Other Interests thought that our piece, Food Safety, Recalls And Why Consumers Don’t Always Need Notification, was fairly persuasive. We didn’t, however, persuade the person we addressed it to, microbiologist Phyllis Entis. Ms. Entis responded with another piece, this one titled, “FDA and Stealth Recalls.” Ms. Entis went out and researched other recalls that had not been publicized by the FDA and noted that these were not sold in totes as in the original issue. Although the original comments related to a specific situation with spinach packed in totes, the real issue is whether consumers will benefit from knowing of a recall. 2/27/2012
Balancing Priorities: Why Is Food Still Making Us Sick In The 21st Century saw the Association of Health Care Journalists recently held a conference and the agenda was extensive. Of particular interest to the food industry was a seminar titled, “Why is food still making us sick in the 21st century?” So why do we still have foodborne illness? Such problems exist for one of two reasons… either A) We don’t know how to prevent such illnesses, or B) We do know how but choose not to do so. Recognizing these two reasons leads to several possible explanations that could answer the question and that point to various policy responses. 4/11/2013
Science-based Or Emotion-based? As Food Safety Modernization Act Soon Goes Into Effect, Industry Looks At Extra Costs And Little Return To Public Health feels that executives at the FDA really do want to target their efforts where they would have an impact. They do not want to burden farmers and businesses with unnecessary regulation to no point. However, the difficulties of framing regulations and the institutional imperatives of the FDA will doubtless lead to much bother and expense being imposed on farmers and businesses with little, if any, return when it comes to public health. We asked Harold Gordon, a Partner at Jones Day, if he and some his colleagues could weigh in on the Food Safety Modernization Act, and what follows is the first of two pieces related to this subject. 4/11/2013
| 
.jpg)
.gif "Floral Business Magazine")
.gif "NY Produce Show 2013")
