SafetyChain Blog

Managing a gluten-free program alongside other regulatory and customer requirements can be challenging and complex for food companies. Yet, the safety of your consumers and the integrity of your brand depend on the effectiveness of your gluten-free management program. It is therefore essential to ensure your program requirements are being met daily – a demanding task in an environment with multifarious products, ingredients, and processes.

Beyond providing a variety of safe and easily accessible food choices for people with Celiac disease, gluten-free foods are becoming a highly sought-after choice among many individuals across the world. Yet, making the shift towards becoming gluten-free requires putting a comprehensive management program in place first.

While gluten-free remains a voluntary claim for food manufacturers, regulatory agencies like the FDA and Canadian Food Inspection Agency have specific requirements which detail what that claim means. Under both aforementioned governing bodies, any foods declared gluten-free must contain less than 20 parts per million (ppm) of gluten. Here, we take a closer look at what these and other gluten-free regulations mean for the food industry.

Recently, gluten-free products have begun to line the shelves of every major food retailer, with many restaurants offering gluten-free menu options as well. Yet, because the gluten-free movement is still relatively new in the food industry, many people are still wondering how we got here, and what it means to be gluten-free.

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

Each month, we follow the latest trends and news in food safety and quality to bring you insights and updates from thought leaders in the food and beverage industry. Here's a roundup of some of our favorite articles and blog posts from around the web in November 2018.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently released its Quarterly Enforcement Report for the 2018 federal fiscal year. This robust body of data sheds light on many trends, and with a 98.5% compliance rate, serves as a tribute to both USDA’s Inspection Service (FSIS) and the industry as a whole: these companies and the people who manage them are clearly in concert with USDA on the subject and practice of food safety. Here are some other numbers to consider:

Food safety technology can help companies manage complex program requirements, achieve visibility into day-to-day operations, and maintain audit preparedness. It can also help you pinpoint risks, enforce preventive controls, and streamline your documentation processes through a single, unified system. Yet, it’s important to make sure the system you’re considering has the ability to keep up with robust program requirements. If you’re considering a food safety solution for your facility, look for a system that is able to:

For many companies, successfully managing complex FSMA requirements is arduous at best. With nearly 70% of companies polled in the 2017 Food Safety & Quality Operations Survey by SafetyChain and the Acheson Group falling under FSMA, it’s clear that this latest FDA reform will continue to impact the majority of food and beverage companies for the foreseeable future. The ability to stay competitive and perform well in audits therefore lies in implementing solutions that can support a robust FSMA food safety plan.

For food and beverage companies, food quality and safety issues pose the greatest threat to brand and financial health. Yet, the task of ensuring the safest, highest quality product to customers is no easy feat – especially when we consider the rising regulatory mandates such as FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), challenges in adhering to non-regulatory standards such as Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) schemes, and supply chain complexities. To compound these issues, there are also significant pressures to operate within Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Add in the heightened consumer awareness of food safety issues, and it’s clear that a fundamental shift needs to take place to enable food safety and quality assurance operations teams to more efficiently – and proactively – fulfil their roles.

Due to the very nature of the food and beverage industry, it’s likely food safety and quality challenges such as risk management, scalability, operational visibility, and compliance will continue to impact companies for the foreseeable future. Since these challenges will be at the forefront of organizations’ priorities, many forward-thinking companies are adopting food safety technology to solve them. Here are some of the ways technology can remove the complexities associated with each challenge: