Another recall just came across the news feed. A few minutes before that, there was a news flash about a foodborne outbreak. It got me to thinking: What is the correlation, if any, between the foodborne outbreaks and recalls?
Although the United States Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has been fairly quiet lately with regard to new regulatory initiatives, two recent issuances involving foodborne pathogens should be noteworthy to the meat and poultry industry.
As a food-safety lawyer, these three words send shivers down my spine. They are all exceptionally difficult to routinely control in products regulated by the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). Almost invariably, at least one of these three words is featured prominently in recalls.
What does 2018 have in store for the meat and poultry industry? There is a plethora of issues facing our industry from trade to immigration to recovering from weather events. Below are a few regulatory and legislative issues that may affect the FSIS-regulated industry in 2018.
On May 1, the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) began the next phase of its nationwide Raw Pork Products Exploratory Sampling Project (RPPESP). The purpose of the project is to determine the prevalence of pathogens in pork and use this data to “inform food safety policies.”
While the FSIS-regulated food industry has directed most of its limited food-safety resources over the last decade toward keeping harmful pathogens out of its food products, the existence of undeclared allergens has become a major issue.