Safe Food for Your Pets

An example of this would be something as basic as the company’s traffic control pattern program, Dr. Evans says. “We educate the employees on basic food safety principles regarding keeping raw material areas separate from finished product areas,” she relates. “As a result, they understand the basic microbiology and principles of cross-contamination. From there we go into how we can measure that, through effective microbiological environmental monitoring programs. We explain what we swab, how often, and why.”

Typically once a year, Diamond management presents data to its employees to demonstrate the effectiveness of the environmental monitoring program.

“We had one incident where we saw elevated levels of environmental micro activity on floor swabs during a period of time when we had numerous contractors in the area,” Dr. Evans mentions. “It was nice to show the employees that the increased activity in traffic pattern from contractors played a role in elevated floor micro counts. It was also nice to show the data that illustrated how the counts went back down when we initiated tighter traffic control patterns for contractors and added additional food sanitation stations throughout the plants.”

Dr. Evans says that keeping employees informed in this manner is a good example of how Diamond ultimately wins over team members who may have balked when certain new seemingly cumbersome or unnecessary programs or procedures were implemented, such as traffic control and multiple sanitation stations for hands and feet.

“When you show them the data and communicate measurable impacts, the employees see the importance of the programs,” she emphasizes.

Buy in and acknowledgement of food safety programs from vendors is also important, she adds. “As an industry we have to educate our vendors that the ingredients they supply us have higher expectations today because the products we produce have higher expectations from our consumers than ever before,” Dr. Evans relates.

Great Food Safety Strides

The pet food industry has made incredible strides in strengthening the food safety culture mindset and preventive programs since those landmark Salmonella recalls, and the data to support that is evident, Dr. Evans adds.

She mentions a 2013 CDC publication, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Vol. 19 No.3 March 2013, in which CDC reports yearly estimates of foodborne illness attributed to different commodities (see Graph 1).

Graph 1.

Fresh produce contributed to over 4 million illnesses, meat and poultry to over 2 million, and dairy and eggs to 1.9 million, while pet food was less than 150 over a four-year period.

“Even more compelling was the data reporting deaths related to foodborne illness,” Dr. Evans points outs (see Graph 2).

Meat and poultry were reported to be responsible for 418 deaths, produce 333 deaths, dairy and eggs 211 deaths, fish and shellfish 94 deaths.

“All this was just for 2013 alone, while there has never in the history of CDC been a human death reported attributed to pet food,” Dr. Evans relates.

“In spite of the compelling CDC data that illustrates that pet food is of relatively low risk, the pet food industry has embraced food safety and is leading the way as an industry to best of class when it comes to food safety and food safety culture,” Dr. Evans emphasizes.

FSMA Quirks

The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) Preventive Controls for Animal Food rule is final, effective Nov. 16, 2015, and compliance dates for some businesses begin in September 2016.

Graph 2.

The most interesting thing about the new regulations is that FDA is requiring pet food to test negative for Salmonella, says James Dickson, PhD, professor of animal science at Iowa State University, Ames. His household includes a yellow Labrador Retriever named Elle, Lexi the chocolate Lab, and Jasmine the cat.