The Modern Age of Food Quality and Safety

Mary Ann Platt had a personal account of this in 1984 when she was the director of quality assurance for NutraSweet.

“NutraSweet came out of Searle, a pharmaceutical company. From the very beginning, it was handled like a pharmaceutical ingredient,” she says. “In the mid 1980s, we already had the systems and procedures in place that you really only started seeing 10 years later in the food industry. They had pharmaceutical origins, so we just needed to see what was applicable and how we could modify the needs to our business models.”

In the near future, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO; Geneva, Switzerland) is set to release the ISO 22000 Food Safety Management Standard. Slated for publication in early 2005, it will define the requirements of a food safety management system covering all organizations in the food chain from farmers to catering, including packaging.

“There has been a worldwide proliferation of third party HACCP and food safety standards developed both by national standards organizations and industry groups. ISO 22000 aims to harmonize all of these standards,” the global standards body indicates. While this is a long-awaited milestone, there is still work to be done.

Food safety and quality cannot stop at the processor or supplier levels. There needs to be the same commitment at the retail level, from grocery stores to restaurants to institutional food service operations, says Henry Carsberg, a columnist for Food Quality and a food safety consultant.

“The FDA is really going to start looking at these folks because the processors are under HACCP, SSOPs and GMPs. They are just loaded with protocols, but there is some finger pointing going on,” Carsberg explains. “The processors are starting to say, ‘What about the [customer] who has to buy a piece of fish out of a stinky case, with dirty ice and blood in it?’ The food service industry says just because someone gets sick doesn’t mean it was because of us. It’s time for them to get out of this self-denial.”

That ethic also needs to go global, especially in developing countries as Professor Unnevehr from the University of Illinois talked about.

“It used to be that food safety and food quality testing was extremely focused towards the United States,” says DuPont Qualicon’s Huttman. “But being such a global economy, people in Shanghai are demanding a higher degree of quality and safety in their food. You see it in New Delhi and San Paolo, Brazil.”

At the manufacturing level, the future will bring faster, easier, online, real-time testing, he says. “I don’t think we’ll see it in the near future, unless someone invents the tricorder like Bones had on Star Trek,” Huttman adds. “There needs to be more standardized, automated and easier methods to ensure that, as the VP of QA, you can go home and sleep well at night.”

At the food service level, however, especially in developing countries, he says food quality and safety will mean testing workers for Hepatitis A, which can easily be passed through food, as well as bar-coding systems to monitor hand-washing.

These types of interventions, Huttman says, will solidify “standard operating procedures where food is prepared for the consumer.” Without such protocols, he says, all of the steps that ensured the quality and safety of food products delivered to the door of a restaurant or grocery store would have been for nothing. –FQ