How We Can Make the U.S. Food Safety System Function Appropriately | Episode 108

In episode 108 of Don't Eat POOP! A Food Safety Podcast, Matt Regusci and I are talking about a very important but also potentially controversial topic: how the significant changes that are happening with this new administration in the USDA, CDC, FDA, and other U.S. agencies that oversee food will impact food safety and the lives of American citizens.

Tune in for this much-needed discussion.

We bring the information they’ve gathered from talking to a lot of people in these different agencies and focus on the actual policy implications, opportunities, and issues rather than simply the politics behind it all. We also share what we believe should be done to make the U.S. food safety system function appropriately.

Catch up with previous episodes at Savvy Food Safety, Inc.'s Podcast Archives.

In this episode:

• [01:38] Preface to the episode, which touches upon current politics
• [09:16] Can the government solve these problems?
• [10:30] Bureaucracy is getting in the way
• [13:11] The consequences of the current government incentives
• [14:28] From constantly replacing everybody to not being able to let them go
• [17:36] The article on Jim Jones’ resignation that Francine participated in
• [19:35] The confusing way food is overseen in the U.S. and some solutions
• [25:52] What was wrong with the FDA Reorganization Plan
• [26:57] What Francine and Matt would do to improve the food safety system
• [41:47] Matt and Francine’s views on what the future will bring
• [45:27] The impact of lobbyists and the origin of the term

Matt’s Solutions

1. One U.S. Food Safety Department (UFSD)

There are altogether ?15 agencies that oversee human foods within the United States, and they cannot talk or relay information to each other, which makes it really difficult to predict and trace outbreaks.

So, the idea here is to combine all of those into one department, like the United States Food Safety Department.?

Within that, there would be the USDA's Meat Inspection and FSIS, the CDC, when it comes to food safety cases, and the FDA food division, all in one department.

Matt has a solution to allow people to make real decisions without worrying about what their future job is going to be:

• If someone leaves the U.S. Food Safety Department, they cannot work for the industry for 3 or 5 years. That means you cannot leave and go straight to working on the board or as an executive in a food company.?

2. Inspections

A huge part of my budget would go to the State Departments to act as the department’s inspectors.

This is very important because they are the boots on the ground, who can move in faster, and perform cheaper inspections since there won’t be travel and accommodation costs, which would allow for more inspections to happen overall.

The goal here is to not allow another case like Boar’s Head to happen.

There will be way more technology to help facilitate state departments and the U.S. Food Safety Department, which will allow them to make better decisions really quickly. That’s because the UFSD will be able to look at all the data that is being generated across the food industry and analyze where the risk is higher.

With that in mind, they’ll be able to send someone from that county or state department to perform more inspections based upon the high risk levels. These inspections will feed directly into the database.

In the Boar’s Head case, the State Department of Virginia reported that the facility had multiple issues, but there was no follow-up.

Within this new department, things would be different. Since they already know that this is a high-risk facility, when the inspection turns up all these problems, then the next step will be to open up a longer investigation. The UFSD would do a deep dive into the facility to really see if they are about to kill a whole bunch of people.

The most important part of this process is that those involved in the investigation would have more power to shut the facility down. In the case of international suppliers, even though the department would not have the authority to shut the place down, they can achieve a similar result by revoking their ability to export products into the U.S. until they’ve fixed the issues that were found.

Because it is the companies’ responsibility to comply with food safety best practices, in order to disincentivise them to continue overlooking this issue and remind them that they have skin in the game, they would be the ones who would pay for the costs related to the inspections and investigation of their facilities.

That means that if a facility is showing up in the database as a risk, the UFSD will send someone in to perform an inspection, and the company will have to cover the cost, whether they like it or not, especially if the Department has to go in and perform a longer investigation that might take months.

Matt thinks it’s important to show all food companies that commercialize their products in the U.S. that there are true and immediate consequences to having an unsafe facility or product, to show that if you are about to kill people, then you are going to be punished right away, not when an eventual outbreak or recall happens.

Hopefully, this will help fund the necessary inspections, make food companies minimize their risk, and increase the UFSD’s ability to find high-risk facilities.

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Francine’s Solutions

Because I spent much more of my time working on the retail side of the industry, I have so many other ideas on what could be done that the food safety system is not doing.

1. Integrated Education Campaigns

There should be the development of joint education campaigns that target both consumers and food service operators. These campaigns can focus on shared responsibilities for food safety, emphasizing how consumer choices and awareness can impact food safety in restaurants, because nobody knows, and this is a relatively easy way this could be done.

2. Online Resources and Tools

User-friendly online resources and tools that provide consumers with information on how to properly assess food safety practices within the food service establishments should be created. This could include checklists for consumers to recognize safe practices and encourage them to ask servers, "What food safety measures are you taking?"?

That in turn would make the restaurants more accountable. Any food service facility would at that point be more accountable.?

3. Public Reporting Systems

Right now, a lot of people don't even know that you can go online and look up this food safety information, whether it be at the various online reporting systems that are available or by looking up the health department score.

This would allow consumers to easily report food safety concerns or violations they observe in restaurants and it could be linked to regulatory agencies so that they could respond effectively to provide feedback to restaurants to improve their practices. I believe that consumers would also be much more likely to want to do that if it were connected to a regulatory agency live.

4. Incentives for Compliance

?What incentives does the food industry have to comply?

Right now? None. There are some potential outbreaks or other negative incentives, but there are definitely no positive incentives.?

There's no “caught you for being good” type of thing. There are no awards for being the safest establishment. There's just nothing.

Let's be honest, where does the funding at the state level come from?

From the federal government and also from their tax base. Some of these state departments are not just getting federal money, they're having to prop their operations up with state money.?

But if we could find food safety grants for compliance to help stop foodborne illness, wouldn't that be an amazing thing for facilities that provide exemplary compliance ratings?

5. Quality of Audits and Inspections

How are people getting 100s on their health inspections time after time? How is that the problem in any industry?

I don't even know how it's possible to get 100 on your inspection time after time. Nobody is perfect.?

Well, that's where the data side of things can make a difference. A lot of people from the FDA have talked about how they're really trying to use data to analyze auditors and inspectors. Standard deviation curves are very powerful when it comes to this analysis.

They look at whether the person fails everybody every single time, or whether they give everybody 100 percent every single time. If that is the case, their standard deviation curve is going to be very low, somewhere close to 0.?

But, if somebody walks in and fails a restaurant or a facility one day, and the next day gives somebody a 95%, their standard deviation curve is going to be very high, which means that they walk in with no preconceived notion of that facility. They're just observing what they find, and they're posting it directly as is.

The second option is what you want. You want someone with a high standard deviation curve. Those are the people who should be training the ones with the low standard deviation curve, or at least retraining them.?

6. Public Recognition

Certifications, financial incentives, and collaborative research initiatives would be a great thing to explore behavior related to food safety, and how it intersects with food service operations.

7. Enhanced Communication

Both consumers and operators would benefit from sharing research findings. Right now, no one is sharing anything.

But what would truly improve American food safety is if the agencies that oversee food started communicating with each other, sharing data in real time, integrating technology, and sharing resources.

8. Implementation of Comprehensive Standardized Training Programs

Comprehensive standardized training programs should be implemented, because right now, across the board, from state to state, every state's doing something different, and every jurisdiction within that state can be different.?

That's a problem.?

I think that standardizing practices and expectations across the country would help reduce the incidence of foodborne illnesses.?

While these can be state-to-state things, nothing is going to change at the state level if we don't change something at the federal level.

There's currently no direction from the federal government explaining to the states, the counties, and the municipalities what the goal is for food compliance, so much so that some states are actually ahead of the FDA.?

We need to get it together, stop having such a convoluted food safety system, and start streamlining and standardizing it.

We'd love to hear from you!

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