Food Safety Management during Pandemic - Preventive Control Programs are working exactly as they should

I've had a lot of questions sent my way about food safety over the past few days of pandemic response. Can we trust the safety of our food? Will corona viruses be transmitted through the food supply? How can we know what to eat? The challenge with COVID-19 is that it emerged as a known pathogen only very recently, so there is very little scientific literature at this point giving indication about the virus' ability to remain viable on food surfaces. Meanwhile the message is clear that we have little reason to fear our food safety.

This is where risk based preventive controls are absolutely key.

In our food processing sector, we have focused on using risk based preventive controls as our primary means of maintaining a safe food supply. This means we think about all the possible hazards that could occur within the food supply, and then link every possible hazard to a robust means of prevention. Even rare or uncommon hazards get full attention. Then we treat every food being processed using our prevention mindset, and mitigate risks in a very organized way.

Viral disease passing through the food supply is a very real hazard that we have known about and mitigated for decades within the industrial food processing sector. Hepatitis A, norovirus, Norwalk, these are all well documented in the literature as passing through food supply. But it is very rare that we hear about this possible viral contamination in processed foods because risk based preventive controls work. It's the model invented for NASA space mission food safety, and it is used in thousands upon thousands of food manufacturing facilities around the world with great success.

Starting with the supply chain, food companies verify the quality of the food inputs coming into the facility. Companies are meticulous to evaluate that the primary producers use exceptional food safety practices, such as monitoring irrigation water quality, ensuring farm workers are healthy while on the job, using personnel hygiene practices such as hand washing, and good sanitation practices for the products they make and grow.

Next, when a product goes for secondary processing, more preventive controls are used. This starts with personnel hygiene, again making sure workers are not working when unwell, then ensuring good handwashing and hygiene practice, along with use of personal protective equipment such as gloves, sleeves, face masks or shields, hair nets, gowns or aprons, and boots that can withstand strong sanitizers. Sanitation practices are used on food equipment, and the efficacy and completeness is monitored routinely, sometimes multiple times a day with rapid lab testing and visual inspections. Critical processes such as heating, cooling, acidification or addition of antimicrobial additives are performed and monitored by trained workers with properly calibrated tools, and often monitored by online computerized testing. And when all that is said and done, checked and double checked, and the product is ready to go, in many facilities, the product is then subject to randomized microbial sampling, just to be 110% confident. In the biggest food manufacturers, everything I just described is not only done, it is documented, recorded, and audited. What I described is also used in a practical way by small food processors and many restaurants, perhaps not with all the documentation and extremes in personal protective equipment, but done in an appropriately scaled version. These same food safety principles are practiced by both food processing and food service professionals around the world.

The European Food Safety Authority has indicated COVID-19 is not transmitted through the food supply. Even with that evidence, I am personally glad that so many of my esteemed colleagues, my alumni and students are using preventive controls strategies for food safety. Whether you call it HACCP, HARPC, GFSI, SQF, BRC, SFCR, or any other number of acronyms, risk based preventive controls are one of our best ways of ensuring a safe and secure food supply. Professionalizing our food industries and ensuring training in this risk management practice is an excellent way to ensure our collective health and wellness.