Milestones in Food Safety: 2000-2009

Editor’s note: As Food Quality & Safety celebrates 30 years of publication, we think it’s fitting to examine the major food safety events of the period and to highlight the extraordinary efforts to make food safer over the last three decades. In this important retrospective, you’ll hear food safety experts discuss—decade by decade—the monumental outbreaks, regulations, and technologies that played pivotal roles in advancing food safety, often sharing events they were there to witness and shape. In this article, we take a look at the 2000s. Our other articles look at the 1990s and the 2010s.

The 2000s saw an increased regulatory focus on food safety, advances in new technologies designed to testing for and detect foodborne pathogens, globalization of the supply chain, a focus on traceability, the reliance on third-party certification audits to verify the safety and quality of a company’s products, and an increase in consumer awareness of food safety, says Tracy Fink, director of scientific programs and food safety at the Institute of Food Technologists in Chicago. Several deadly outbreaks of foodborne illness also occurred during this time period, many of which significantly impacted the future of the safe food production.

The new millennium started off with the private sector establishing the 2000 Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), which was created by the Consumer Goods Forum to collaboratively drive industry improvement to reduce food safety risks and increase consumer confidence in the delivery of safe food. A group of leading food safety experts including manufacturers, retailers, and suppliers, launched GFSI to establish a global standard for food safety management systems, says Gary Nowacki, CEO of TraceGains, a supply chain ­solutions company based in Westminster, Colo.

The organization immediately sought to synchronize the world’s food safety audit standards to help mitigate retailer liability exposure and eliminate audit duplication, Nowacki says. In addition, GFSI added “benchmarking” to the accredited certification model, an additional step that determined equivalency between existing food safety schemes while preserving choices in the market.

Early adopters of GFSI, including Walmart, Nestle, Coca-Cola, Carrefour, and Tesco, played significant roles in mainstreaming the initiative. In fact, in 2008, Walmart became the first national retailer in the United States to require suppliers of its private label and other food products to have their factories certified against one of the internationally recognized GFSI standards, Nowacki says.

Companies had to address and fix internal problems before earning certification. Certification ensures audit deficiencies are tracked and corrected in a timely manner, which allowed companies to direct resources to other areas that required improvement. Today, the organization comprises 45 retailers and manufacturers.

Deadly Listeria Outbreak

The 2000s were riddled with deadly foodborne illness outbreaks. In 2002, Listeria monocytogenes in processed turkey from Pilgrim’s Pride Corp. killed seven people, sickened 46, and caused three miscarriages. The company recalled more than 27 million pounds of poultry, the largest recall in history.

This was one of the first examples in which PulseNet was used to identify a large outbreak in near real time, facilitating a more rapid response, says Lee-Ann Jaykus, PhD, professor of food, bioprocessing, and nutrition sciences at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

The incident, along with other high-profile outbreaks of the late 1990s, ushered in an era in which class action lawsuits for large outbreaks became more commonplace. The bacterial outbreaks at Pilgrim’s Pride, Jack in the Box (1993), and Sara Lee (1998), among others, served as an impetus for either establishing consumer advocacy groups promoting food safety, such as STOP Foodborne Illness and the Center for Foodborne Illness Research and Prevention, or increasing an organization’s visibility, such as in the case of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Dr. Jaykus says.