U.S, Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration are tasked with the responsibility of ensuring the safety of the U.S. food supply. These agencies do so by creating and implementing new guidance, policies, and rules, by conducting food facility inspections (whether continuous or periodic), by occasionally performing environmental or finished product sampling during those inspections, and then by performing Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) on positive samples that they find. In turn, WGS will generate a precise genetic signature that is uploaded forever into the GenomeTrakr database, where it can be compared to other isolates collected over time from food processing facilities, food company products, and clinical patients.
In turn, FDA and USDA have begun to discuss how WGS can be increasingly leveraged by the agencies and food companies to identify and solve food safety issues. In FDA’s New Era of Smarter Food Safety Blueprint, the agency acknowledges that “[it] wants to tap into new technologies [such as WGS] and integrate data streams to identify outbreaks and trace the origin of a contaminated food to its source in minutes, or even seconds, speeding our response when public health is at risk.” USDA is also now using WGS while conducting its inspection and investigative activities. These efforts have and will also continue to identify possible ways to encourage industry to adopt WGS as a tool in its own root source investigations to find niche organisms when food facilities identify pathogens in the food processing environment or in finished products. By doing so, the regulators argue, the overall food supply can become more safe.