The US FDA recently conducted conversations with experts on food topics and confirmed that international collaboration on food safety is still a top priority. In a May 2023 article about the conversation, officials at the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) Office of International Engagement (OIE) discussed the importance of engaging with international organizations to the FDA mission, and noted: “The U.S. food safety system is one of the most respected around the world. At the CFSAN, we have one goal in mind with respect to the nation’s food supply, to promote public health by ensuring that it is safe, sanitary, wholesome, and honestly labeled.”
The article went on to say: “CFSAN experts engage with international organizations for many important reasons. We collaborate to strengthen the global food safety system, to ensure safe and fair trade in food, and to encourage the harmonization of science-based food safety standards. The increased safety assurances this involvement provides are particularly important given the volume of imported food we consume in the U.S.”
To help meet consumer demands, the FDA estimates that the United States imports about 15 percent of its overall food supply from more than 200 countries or territories and roughly 125,000 food facilities with additional supplies from farms that provide approximately 32 percent of the fresh vegetables, 55 percent of the fresh fruit, and 94 percent of the seafood that Americans consume annually.
But like farms and food processing facilities in the United States, global suppliers face food safety issues, including outbreak prevention, traceability, and removing physical contaminants before they reach the consumer.
When it comes to physical contaminants, problems can occur at the farm or the facility or anywhere between the supplier and the consumer. Metal, plastics, stones, glass, and bones can originate at the farm. As the food is harvested, these foreign objects can end up commingled and transported into the processing plant. Then as the food moves into the processing and packaging facility, there is potential for more foreign physical contaminants – like broken machinery pieces, loose screws and bolts. As a result, sometimes small pieces of that machinery can end up in a product or package. Even glass shards resulting from broken or damaged jars or wood from the pallets used to move goods around the factory or across continents, can contaminate a packaged product.
Manufacturers can protect against such risk by inspecting incoming materials and auditing suppliers to ensure quality at the beginning of the process, and then inspecting products after each major processing step as well as after final packaging.
There are food X-ray inspection systems that are utilized to help find glass, rocks, bones or plastic pieces. X-ray inspection systems are based on the density of the product and the contaminant. As an X-ray penetrates a food product, it loses some of its energy. A dense area, such as a contaminant, will reduce the energy even further. As the X-ray exits the product, it reaches a sensor. The sensor then converts the energy signal into an image of the food product. Foreign matter appears as a darker shade of grey and helps identify foreign contaminants. The package in question is then rejected from the production line before it gets to the consumer’s hands.
Metal, including pieces of wires or mesh screens – are especially problematic if they get mixed into dry products or embedded in fruits, vegetables, proteins and dairy products; that’s when an industrial metal detector would be appropriate. Metal detectors use high frequency radio signals to detect the presence of ferrous, non-ferrous, and stainless steel contaminants in food or other products. The newest multiscan metal detectors are capable of scanning up to five user-selectable frequencies running at a time, which increases the probability of finding the contaminant before it goes out the door.
To help ensure global organizations follow the highest food safety standards, the CFSAN partners with organizations that align with the same public health mission and interests, including the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the World Trade Organization’s Standards and Trade Development Facility (WTO STDF), and the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation’s (APEC), Food Safety Cooperation Forum (FSCF). The FDA believes that these global partnerships help encourage foreign agencies, laboratories, industries, and academic institutions to adopt internationally accepted food safety standards and methods.
These collaborations have resulted in the ability to help educate authorities in other countries on new technologies to strengthen food safety systems, voluntary guidelines and standards, improvements in regulatory oversight systems, and adoption of international standards and prioritization of important areas of food safety modernization.
The goal of these collaborations with international public health organizations, international standard-setting bodies, and foreign regulatory partners, of course, is to help ensure safer foods for all consumers around the world.
You can read the conversation here.
Additional Resources:
- FDA article: International Collaboration on Food Safety is a Top Priority for the FDA
- Webinar: Reducing vulnerability to foreign object contamination in the food processing industry
- Website: Technologies and Solutions to Improve Food Weighing and Inspection
