Food safety: new regulations and new resources for Montana food businesses.

AuthorHystad, Steph

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It's that time of year again: snow on the ground, a bit of a chill in the air, and break rooms, board rooms, and banquet rooms full of foods for grazing throughout the day and night. As you munch on those homemade cookies, store-bought chips and dips, and crockpots of someone's famous venison meatballs, you may ask yourself:

"I wonder if these cookies are made with eggs from a local farm."

"I hear she gets her wild game processed at a small facility in town somewhere."

"Didn't I just read about an e-coli breakout with this particular brand of dip?"

Nearly 1 in 6 Americans get sick from foodborne illnesses every year, and approximately 3,000 die each year therefrom, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Most of these illnesses and deaths are preventable through the use of safe food handling practices--throughout each step in the food processing supply chain.

To decrease the likelihood of consumers coming into contact with unsafe food, Congress passed and President Obama signed the Food Safety and Modernization Act (FSMA) in 2011 in order to significantly reduce the incidence of these foodborne illnesses that originate within the food supply chain. FSMA will officially go into effect starting in January 2016. In preparation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been finalizing the rules regarding how this new federal law will be implemented, and how food producers and manufacturers can become compliant with the new regulations.

The goal of FSMA is to identify all the possible ways in which food might become adulterated or rendered unsafe, and then establish control steps that mitigate those risks. According to the FDA2, FSMA contains five major elements of regulation:

* Preventive Controls. The FDA now has the mandate to require comprehensive, prevention-based controls across the food supply.

* Inspection and Compliance. The legislation recognizes that inspection is an important means of holding industry accountable for its responsibility to produce safe food. The FDA is committed to applying its inspection resources in a risk-based manner and adopting innovative inspection approaches.

* Imported Food Safety. The FDA has new tools to ensure that imported foods meet U.S. standards and are safe for consumers. For example, for the first time, importers must verify that their foreign suppliers have adequate preventive controls in place to ensure safety, and the FDA will be able to accredit...

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