19fbtechreview.comMAY 2022cXo insightsCurrently, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is espousing a new era of food safety that includes tech-enabled traceability, smarter tools and approaches for prevention and outbreak response, new business models and retail modernization, and food safety culture. This new era is encouraging more collaboration with the industry, growers, and vendors while elevating the field for more science and data-based decision making. At Fresh Del Monte we welcome this new approach and actively engage in deploying rigorous food safety mitigation programs while also endeavoring to continuously improve our programs through innovation.With the FDA's upcoming FSMA 204 requirements in traceability, we started--over a year ago--to systematically and methodically review several technological platforms that will not only ensure our compliance with regulatory requirements, but also allow us more transparency to our customers and consumers. Tech-enabled traceability will allow us to track products from field to fork more accurately in less time (hours to minutes) while reducing waste, enhancing transparency to the supply chain, and limiting the scope of any potential recall. We are also incorporating technology that will allow us active management and monitoring of key critical control points in a process at the facility level, one of the foundations for maintaining a high level of food safety readiness. The ability to have real-time active management of critical control points using sensors anywhere, at any time, has assisted in maintaining industry food safety programs. One critical control point that we manage, in large part through an active monitoring and management system, is chlorine levels.Chlorine has been widely studied and deployed in the fresh produce industry for many years to ensure we don't cross-contaminate our products during the washing process. There is an established minimum level of chlorine required to appropriately mitigate the growth of pathogens. Many of our facilities around the world leverage equipment and sensors that allow for active monitoring and management of FOOD SAFETY IN THE PRODUCE INDUSTRY: APPLICATION OF NOVEL TECHNOLOGIES TO ENHANCE FOOD SAFETY PROGRAMS FROM GROWER TO PROCESSORBY TAKASHI NAKAMURA, VP FOOD SAFETY, FRESH DEL MONTETakashi Nakamura
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