FROM THE FIELD
April 2007
Who's Covering Your Back on Food Safety?

Mass media reports generally score high on factual content, but you’ve always got to wonder what extra context might change your perceptions. Top-line sound bites and lead paragraphs can be as misleading as top-line revenue numbers. Accurate? Sure. Significant? Maybe.

Even allowing for all that, a February report by the Associated Press raises some neck hairs about Food and Drug Administration food inspections—and about what kind of backup you can really assume the government is giving your company’s food-safety programs.

According to an AP analysis of federal records, the report says, the FDA conducted 47% fewer food inspections last year than it did in 2003.

Now, that might not mean that food is half as safe as it was in ’03. But you can pretty well assume that as trends go, this one isn’t good.

Some papers around the country ran full-length stories, and some lopped them off short, so it’s hard to say which versions you read in your own areas or heard on snippet radio news. But in the full length version, some details would calm you down, and others wouldn’t.

"As trends go, this one isn't good."

Among the tastier morsels in the full AP story, both sweet and sour:

Inspections spiked in ’03 on the crest of Homeland Security concerns about food security. So that 47% decline is off of an unusually high base number. Still, a decline is a decline, and this one wipes out the previous rise.  

The number of FDA employees in the field who concentrate on food safety is down 12% from three years ago.

FDA numbers showed 2,455 inspections of U.S. produced foods last year, down from 9,748 in the base year. That’s a 75% drop.

Counterbalancing those alarming measurements, it’s worth noting that FDA sources point out some foods require more attention than others, and FDA is focusing its resources on where the dangers are. So if 80% of the risk is in 20% of the food categories, for example, reducing inspections in low-risk items is not as scary as it might first seem.

Budget is a key issue, as usual. FDA’s food safety budget <i>has<i> risen during these years. It just hasn’t risen enough to cover personnel costs, the AP reports.

And remember, you have to look at this data in the context of a work volume that’s growing, not static. The report notes the number of food facilities to be inspected is rising. The volume of food is rising. The population is rising.

And more food is being imported. Last year, the FDA physically examined 1.3% of imported food. In ’03, with a smaller volume, the agency checked roughly 1.7%.

The details go on and on. Facilities handling high-risk foods such as fresh produce are supposed to be inspected once a year. Lower-risk foods are visited less often.

But what goes on between inspections? A lot of loads of food move through a place in a year.

The real point here is that you have to put your own systems in place. Conduct your own supplier inspections frequently. Make the contracts tight. Train your store-level teams. Wash hands. Get food safety systems on site.

You can’t bet everything on upstream backup.

Brian Ward
Chief Editor