The verification of supplier food safety has emerged as a critical component of a retail operation’s Food Safety Management System (FSMS), but we continue to see Subway stress supplier safety while poor management of its own operations results in outbreaks of foodborne illness.
See Bill Marler’s Food Safety News to learn how a Subway contributed to a community wide outbreak…
I am for a more fair system when it comes to inspections and grading. The grading numbers may not mean much, and this is because inspections are snap shots of events and there are all sorts of bias and human elements. However, when the facility maintains its records of food safety efforts, its more like…
As an environmental health professional, I have enjoyed a successful career in hands-on food protection from farm to table. My success in this wide array of conditions has come through the effective application of environmental health principles.
Nowhere in food safety today is environmental health needed more than down on the farm, where the environmental health risks factors are becoming better understood. As a sanitarian …
Looks like we will not see then end of the Jensen/Frontera/ Primus Auditor issue for some time. While there is plenty of room for criticism of Jensen, Fonterra, and Primus there are also problems with FDA, and this tragic incident has become a hot potato being passed to and fro by congress.
I keep reading FDA’s take …
The noted microbiologist Mansour Samadpour has recently suggested to Bloomberg’s Stephanie Armour that (See Bill Marler’s blog)
“You can make these audits useful by writing them on toilet paper. Then someone would at least use them,” said Mansour Samadpour, president of Lake Forest Park, Washington-based IEH Laboratories and Consulting Group, a food-safety consulting firm, in …
We are now seeing huge gaps in the food safety net. We also see the effect of the serious pathogens like E coli that have become entrenched in our food animals, thus in our food supply, and in our environment. The failure of agriculture to control E. coli has contaminated the entire food …
As the result of the release of the FDA environmental assessment at Jensen Farms, the roles of all food safety persons involved at Jensen Farms-Frontera have rightfully come under fire. Once again the the nature of industry led food safety regulation itself (food safety auditing) is in question.
That all involved maintain some degree of responsibility for this disaster is…
In Bill Marler’s blog below, he quotes Bill Bagby of Tiny Greens, who sickened scores of people for 4 months with his contaminated sprouts.
Mr. Bagby says,
"Sprouts are kind of a magical thing," says Bagby, owner of Tiny Greens, a sprout farm in Urbana, Ill. "In terms of vitamins they’re just off the …
Third party audits of produce are relatively new phenomena. Fueled primarily by the retail sector’s demands for safe year-round supplies of fresh fruits and vegetables, there is a serious industry-led effort underway to evaluate primary production and the resulting supply chain.
While the third party audit model has some similarities with regulatory inspections, there are …
As a person ages, one tends to think about how their life’s work will be evaluated by future generations. Most people would want to be remembered for some accomplishment and hope that in the future, mistakes they made along the way will be forgotten.
For some, however, whatever they may have accomplished in life will be overshadowed by some spectacular…