Lock Out Food Supply Threats

Under guidance from food safety microbiologist Mansour Samadpour, PhD, the man who helped the beef industry develop an E. coli detection program after the Jack in the Box outbreak in 1993, Earthbound developed what is now considered the produce industry’s most aggressive testing and safety program:

• At stage 1, “Seed to Harvest,” seed, irrigation water, soil amendments, and plant tissues are tested for pathogens; all field harvesters are trained in Good Agricultural Practices, and harvest equipment is regularly inspected and sanitized.
• Stage 2, the “Raw Material Firewall,” features the raw material test-and-hold program. Because microbial contamination most commonly occurs at the farm level, samples of incoming salad greens are tested and held until results return negative for pathogens. This can take 8 to 12 hours.
• Stage 3, the “Processing Facility” stage, features triple product washing (Earthbound added a third wash after the outbreak) and elimination of foreign objects using state-of-the-art laser optical sorting.
• At the final stage, the “Finished Product Firewall,” produce is again tested and held for 8 to 12 hours until results return negative for pathogens. Only after clearing this stage is the product released for shipping.

Nestle is a fan of Earthbound’s new program. “It seems extraordinary,” she says. “A microbiologist will tell you it’s not going to stop everything. But it’s certainly going to deal with, on a statistical basis, the probability of something ever happening again.”

Industry reaction to the program has been positive, although there have been a few smaller growers who doubt they’ll ever have a produce safety problem, according to Daniels. “The chances of it happening to a small grower are still there; bacteria don’t differentiate between large and small growers,” Daniels says. “So we’re encouraging every grower and processor out there to conduct a hazard analysis and determine areas where they can best control problems in their own environment.”

Where Is It From?

Early this summer, the University of Georgia’s Doyle passed through Gilroy, Calif., the self-proclaimed “Garlic Capital of the World.” While there, he bought three packages of—surprise, surprise—garlic. At the top of each was a label that read, “Fresh Pacific garlic.” It wasn’t until he got home that he saw the label on the package’s other side: “Product of China.” The lesson here, Doyle says, is that you never really know where things come from or under what conditions they are produced. That’s what makes traceability a huge safety issue.

According to Barbara Rasco, PhD, co-author of Bioterrorism and Food Safety (CRC Press, 2005) and a professor at Washington State University’s Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition in Pullman, Wash., the best food safety and security programs can tell you the origins and status of your product at any given time, from seed to store.

“If someone claims they’ve contaminated your shipment, you can say, ‘There’s no way he could have gone to that point in our facility and done what he says he did, because we have system checks here that are so good we can prove the guy is lying,’” Rasco says. “But only guys who really have their act together with traceability and plant security are the ones who can make this claim.”

From the beginning, Homemade Baby has used a Meal Integrity System that makes traceability rather simple. According to Kiene, each cup of baby food includes a production code identifying the kettle batch the product came from, and a batch card tells plant operators exactly which ingredients were used. “The records on the specific ingredients give us our suppliers’ lot numbers for those ingredients, and the lot numbers identify the specific field and farm where those ingredients were grown,” Kiene says. “This system gives us field to fingers traceability.”