Food manufacturers are facing an update to equipment and facility designs to comply with the newest U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s (FDA) safety rules, which focus on the prevention of foodborne illness. Today’s announcement will ensure that food companies are taking action and working with the FDA to prevent hazards to customers on the front end, rather than waiting to act until an outbreak has occurred. An estimated 3,000 people die.
He said that some large food producers already had sophisticated systems in place, for example, regular swabs of floors, drains and walls inside facilities to check for contaminants, and that the new rules had to be flexible to allow for pre-existing safety systems that were working.
The rule requires animal food facilities to have a written food safety plan that includes a hazard analysis and preventive controls, which will need to be reanalyzed at least once every three years. To cite an example, in the Blue Bell ice cream outbreak this year, the investigators have found many violations at a company plant like dirty equipment, inadequate food storage, food kept at improper temperature and employees not maintaining hand hygiene.
“RFA collaborates with the FDA’s Food Safety Preventive Controls Alliance”, Davis said, “helping to establish training and technical assistance programs for the FSMA regulations”.
As recently as this week the CDC reported two deaths and 70 hospitalizations from salmonella linked with cucumbers imported from Mexico. FDA first proposed provisions in 2013 for the animal food preventative controls rules with additional opportunities to comment on revisions in a 2014 supplemental notice.
In its initial reaction to the directive, the American Feed Industry Association (AFIA) welcomed the agency’s recognition of its request for a phase-in approach to implementation, saying the final rule gives all feed facilities more time to adjust to basic program requirements such as Current Good Manufacturing Practices (CGMPs) before adhering to the rule’s more complicated aspects.
The FDA says consumers and their pets will be protected in various ways.
The two finalized regulations published this morning on the Federal Register – the Preventive Controls for Human Food and Preventive Controls for Animal Food – will shift the industry into prevention mode, forcing manufacturers to take measures that stop outbreaks before they happen.
The agency said the rules are based on extensive outreach since President Barack Obama signed the modernization act into law. As a result, there may be much work to be done by food and beverage companies to achieve compliance with new FSMA requirements.
Food manufacturers will have to show federal regulators how they are preventing food poisoning under new rules. “We believe that most people who produce food want to do it safely”. Operations defined as farms are not subject to the preventive controls rule.
“American consumers have high expectations of the safety of the food supply”, he added.