Rethinking the Food Inspector System | Episode 90

In episode 90 of Don't Eat POOP! A Food Safety Podcast, Matthew Regusci and I are joined by Steven Mandernach, Executive Director at the Association of Food and Drug Officials, straight from the Food Safety Consortium 2024.

“I never thought of it that way” is something you’ll catch yourself saying throughout this episode full of gems.?

Prepare yourself to better understand the harsh realities of being a food inspector, the consequences of the planned budgetary cuts by the FDA to food inspections, how food e-commerce could be better regulated, and more.?

In this episode:

• [01:07] AFDO and what it does for state and local regulators
• [03:31] Understand the FDA Reorganization Plan and its impacts
• [08:06] Rethinking the requirements for food inspectors
• [10:40] Just-in-time training and specialization
• [14:15] FDA information sharing challenges
• [17:15] The realities of food inspector salaries
• [18:42] A hopeful solution for the information sharing issues
• [20:50] When state departments step in for USDA and FDA
• [25:45] The food safety challenges of food e-commerce
• [32:01] AFDO and lobbying
• [33:26] What to do when going through difficult budget times
• [34:55] The contracting system between the states and the FDA
• [38:17] The FDA’s sometimes questionable risk analysis
• [40:23] The sheer deficit of food inspectors
• [43:38] Get the F out of the FDA
• [45:39] How the reorg is going so far
• [47:31] The FDA’s dilemma: a public health or regulatory organization?
• [49:45] What’s good about the Food Safety Consortium 2024

If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, been following me on LinkedIn, and/or have read my book Who Watches the Kitchen? then you probably know that I was a food inspector for about 3 years.

I took the job because I was going to help make things better. I was overqualified and wasn’t being paid nearly enough to do the type of work I was doing, but I wanted to do it.

I did it until I was burnt out. There was an occasion when my life had actually been threatened and another when I had to go in front of the town council to defend myself for trying to protect the public. I got fed up with not having the support I needed.

Needless to say, I would never do it again.

Thankfully, there are still qualified people willing to step into that role. Unfortunately, they’re becoming fewer.

Here are a couple new ways to look at things that might solve this problem, according to Steven Mandernach.

The Current Food Inspector System

• Background and requirements for a food inspector: someone with 30 credits of science, ideally a major or minor in a science field.
• Salary: they are not paid enough for what they do. (Means that just like me, they do it because they believe in what they’re doing, not for the money)
• Expected time in the job: people who come into the job are expected to stay most of their career.

The Big Issues With the Current Food Inspector System

• Industry salaries for people with the background and requirements for a food inspector are double or triple the salary of a food inspector. This means that state and local government food inspection program cannot afford people from the science field. Postings are taking 3, 4, 5, even 8 times to get one position filled.
• Even when they get these people hired than can’t retain them for long. Things have changed and now folks don’t spend their whole career as food inspectors. People go to a job now for maybe four years, get the skills that they think they can get and then move to the next job. The issue here is that they need training. You’re looking at a two year training window for a manufactured food inspector or a retail food inspector. If you're really going to be an expert in some of the more substantive areas, specialized processes really do great work, then you need three to four years before you're there and really at that expert field. Basically, you’re spending all this time and resources in training someone just to lose them as soon as they’re ready to make the most impact.

Some Out of the Box Solutions

1. Rethinking Food Inpector Background and Requirements

The Food Inspector System cannot afford people from the science fields anymore so here’s Steven Mandernach’s solution:

“We may have to change our tool, we may have to work with some of our humanities programs to get the right teaching, the right science, build some certificate programs that are different.?There's huge advantages to that though. We can bring in people that have great skill sets and critical thinking. We can bring in folks that are great communicators, good educators, and use those for this work and teach them the science.” – Steven Mandernach on episode 90 of Don’t Eat Poop! A Food Safety Podcast

2. Just-in-time training and Specialization

Because keeping someone in their food inspector position for more than 4 or 5 years now is very difficult we have to rebuild the training system we have in place to have people ready to hit the ground running.

One way to allow that is to offer them just-in-time training. That is, when they go into a new type of facility that’s specialized and you don’t see everyday, they would get an hour refresher or video on what they need to look for.

For example, there are great differences between a juice manufacturer, a flour milling and a cheese manufacturer. So, having the ability to do some just-in-time training so they’re knowledgeable about each one will make a big difference.

In the past it took years for inspectors to work with more complex items. Now, on day one, you're probably doing complex things and the industry is now your new teacher. So, having just-in-time training can be extremely valuable.

Another approach that allows food inspectors to be ready for work faster is specialization.

We're going to have to specialize and get even more specialized over time so that we literally can spend less time in the field training folks and more time with them inspecting because during that four years that we hopefully get to keep them. We need them actually out there doing the work as much time as we can.

Many states have already noticed that training generalists was not worth it anymore and have started to specialize. Specialization is definitely moving across the country. It's becoming the norm. There's a handful of states that aren't specialized at this point, but every one of them is rethinking it.

3. Salaries

Since there isn’t much we can do about the salaries, we won’t discuss that here. With the looming FDA budget cut it looks like there will be even less resources to pay our food inspectors. So, things are about to get worse with the Food Inspector System. To learn more about this, make sure to listen to the full episode.

We'd love to hear from you!

Connect with Francine, Matt, and the "Don't Eat Poop!" podcast on LinkedIn!?

Share your thoughts and feedback on the show and feel free to offer any topics you would like to hear discussed.

?? Check out Francine's book Who Watches the Kitchen? on Amazon!

#FoodSafety #Food #FoodSafetyAndHygiene #FoodInspector #JustInTimeTraining