Preventing Foodborne Illness: The Farm-to-Fork Focus of the FSMA

What are the costs of foodborne illnesses? A recent Fortune.com article placed the annual cost of medical treatment, lost productivity, and illness-related mortality for affected consumers at $55.5 billion.(1) The industry takes a hit as well to the tune of $7 billion in annual costs from food withdrawals, rejections, and recalls. A large portion of these costs result from internal reworking, commodity loss, inventory replacement, removing goods from shelves, lost sales, and public relations or customer confidence repairs.(2)

The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) was developed and sponsored by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and signed into law on January 4, 2011.(3) For the past 70 years, food safety regulations focused on responding to contamination. The new regulations shift the regulatory focus from identifying the source of a problem after an outbreak to preventing foodborne illness proactively.

The regulations extend prevention requirements to cover the U.S. food supply chain from farm-to-fork. In short, the new law requires greater transparency from the entire supply chain and fundamentally changes the way food is regulated in the U.S. and abroad.”(4)

In service to the FSMA and the food manufacturing industry, TEGAM designs and manufactures datalogging thermometers to track and record temperature monitoring operations at plants, farms and factories. Our dataloggers make continual temperature monitoring convenient, accurate, reportable and repeatable.

Contact us with questions or queries you may have or to get started with temperature monitoring for better food production.
 
1 Beth Kowitt, “The food industry’s $55.5 billion safety problem,” Fortune.com, September 25, 2015. Online at: http://fortune.com/2015/09/25/food-industry-contamination/
2 Barbara Levin, “The ROI of Food Safety and Quality Assurance Technology Solutions,” Food Safety News, September 17, 2012.
3 FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). Online at: http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/FSMA/
4 Katie Moore, The Final FSMA Rules Are Here: It’s Time to Comply; Food Safety Magazine, February 25, 2016. Online: http://www.foodsafetymagazine.com/signature-series/the-final-fsma-rules-are-here-ite28099s-time-to-comply/