SafetyChain Blog

FSMA News

In the past month, the FDA made some noteworthy announcements, including the retirement of Stephen Ostroff, Deputy Commissioner for Foods and Veterinary Medicine. Walmart food safety executive Frank Yiannas will join the FDA to fill a similar role, but his title will be Deputy Commissioner for Food Policy and Response.

Check out our favorite articles on food quality and safety from October!

Each month, we follow the latest trends and news to bring you insights and updates from thought leaders in the food industry. Here's a roundup of our favorite articles and blog posts from around the web in October.

Oftentimes the supply chain is perceived as a linear relationship among suppliers and customers. In reality, however, it is more like a web. Although there may be visibility into your tier 1 suppliers, visibility at tier 2 is often lacking. As you trace back and visibility decreases, you must identify which risks are most significant. Some risks may have a small potential impact on your company’s food safety, for instance, while the impact of others could be massive. Certain ingredients may only affect a few products, while others may affect many.

To some extent, the effectiveness of your supply chain management lies in your ability to collaborate seamlessly with suppliers. You must also ensure that teamwork is achieved within your own facility. Here, we explore some best practices your company can follow to support collaborative food supplier management.

At every level of the supply chain, food and beverage companies face increasing complexity. While the key drivers for this added complexity vary, many companies share a demand for innovation, including new flavors, new products, and exciting ingredients. There are also new threats to food, including the appearance of new microbes and instances of bacteria such as E. coli emerging in previously unsuspected products and ingredients. These complexities are in part what led the FDA to recognize the supply chain as a major risk, and the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) was developed as a result.

Building a foundation for any effective supplier compliance system lies in your company’s ability to identify its supply chain risks. Yet, in the food and beverage industry, not all suppliers present equal risks. How, then, should you differentiate among these risks? You should be dedicating your resources to the areas of greatest risk, but in order to do that, you must first determine which are most significant.

 To protect the food supply, and ultimately the population, food companies must develop a goal-based food defense. A goal-based food defense is effective for two key reasons: it satisfies FSMA requirements, and it keeps people, products, assets, and brands protected against any potential threats.

In the world of food manufacturing, audit compliance is among the most critical elements to a company’s success. Yet, it is also one of the most challenging aspects of food quality and safety management. Here are a few of the ongoing obstacles organizations must overcome.

Within recent decades, food and beverage companies have begun to face new threats. Terrorism has evolved, and the food industry must take a defensive stance in order to combat food safety issues before they happen. Food and beverage companies must be preemptive in developing a defense strategy, which is also an essential component of FSMA compliance.

In 2011, the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) was signed into law by President Obama. It was the most sweeping reform of food safety laws in more than 70 years, with the aim of shifting the focus from responding to food contamination events to actively preventing them.