FDA Launches FDA-TRACK-a Food Safety Dashboard to Track FSMA Progress

FDA launches a new dashboard that helps track and monitor how the enterprises are executing the parts of the law and how those changes are affecting the food safety system.

FREMONT, CA: The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recognized a Food Safety Dashboard. This dashboard is designed to track the impact of the seven foundational rules of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), measure the progress, and help the company in refining its execution. The dashboard is available as part of the FDA-TRACK program, the FDA's agency-wide performance management system.

While the organization embarks on a new era of smarter food safety by continuing the successful execution of FSMA will support the FDA's goal of minimizing the incidence of illness and death attributable to the preventable continuation of the FDA-regulated human and animal food products. The FDA will announce the availability of the initial metric, which will embark on tracking outcomes for the three FSMA rules in the areas of control.

• The Current Good Manufacturing Practice, Hazard Analysis, and Risk-Based Preventive Controls rule both the human food and food for the animals

• Imported food safety, including the data relevant to the Foreign supplier Verification Program (FSVP) rule.

All the FDA-regulated products imported into the United States are essential to meet the same laws and regulations as domestic food. The present data on inspections provide a snapshot into both the domestic and foreign industry compliance with these regulations. The organizations are also measuring the effectiveness of oversight of foreign suppliers by the United States importers, which will track through the classification of the FSVP inspections.

 The factors which will influence the interpretation of the data, especially in the early phases of the FSMA implementation are:

• The prevention controls and FSVP rules featured staggered the compliance dates based on the business size to allow businesses (small) more time to comply

• FDA does not inspect the same firms on a quarterly or annual basis, so these inspection results do not represent a consistent cohort of firms

• The FDA's approach to implementing the FSMA rules has been to "educate before and while we regulate". The FDA conducts interactive inspections that emphasize education and help bring the industry into compliance while focusing on enforcement actions on food safety problems that pose a threat to public health.