Baking & Snack - September 2021 - 20

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years
cording them, tracking them. The technology has really
helped us out on monitoring critical control points. You
can see the information live on your desktop and know
exactly what's going on; lab results come in automatically,
and all of this saves us time and money and helps
us be more efficient. "
Challenges for the future
Building off the foundation laid by FSMA, the FDA announced
its blueprint for the New Era of Smarter Food
Safety in July 2020. This blueprint - a PDF document
that bakers can find on FDA's website - outlines FDA's
approach to food safety going forward. It leans heavily
on the processes put in place by FSMA but also focuses
on four core elements: tech-enabled traceability, smarter
tools and approaches for prevention and outbreak response,
new business models and retail modernization,
and food safety culture.
" The New Era of Smarter Food Safety is an approach
to bending the curve of foodborne illness through the
use of new technologies and approaches, " said Frank
Yiannas, deputy FDA commissioner.
This new era is ushered in by the final rule of FSMA
that needs to be implemented. The Traceability Rule,
currently under review, digitizes traceability and provides
transparency across the supply chain. Companies
that manufacture, process, pack or hold food on the
Food Traceability List will capture required data points,
store them electronically or in paper records for 24
months. Companies must also share key data elements
with other partners in the supply chain.
" The vision for the FDA is that trading partners
would be able to speak the same language through the
standardization of what they are calling critical tracking
events and key data elements, " said Julie McGill
of FoodLogicQ during an educational session at the
American Society of Baking's technical conference earlier
this year. " Tech-enabled traceability will enable
companies to meet the expectations of this new era of
smarter food safety and eventually get to the place where
interoperability is within those systems. "
While previous FSMA rules have left room for different
industries to adapt their existing processes, this proposed
rule will call for industry to conform to FDA.
" FDA has been good about setting broad parameters,
and individual food sectors can tweak their best practices
to fit regulations, rather than FDA being overly prescriptive, "
Ms. Zvaners said. " We support food safety, but
we strongly encourage FDA to keep it simple. We feel
that some of this may be overly prescriptive. "
While the public comments are closed for this
rule, the FDA has not issued a final rule, but has until
November 2022 to do so.
20 Baking & Snack September 2021 / www.bakingandsnack.com
FDA's blueprint also will explore using technology and
data in prevention and outbreak response, but also promoting
safety in new business models like e-commerce
and the expanding market for food delivery. These accelerated
markets pose new challenges for the safe handling
of food. Some of these business models were new
or nonexistent when FSMA was signed into law, and
therefore aren't adequately addressed.
While most of the baking industry uses a kill step
such as the oven or fryer to control pathogens, that fatal
peanut butter tragedy of 2008 has everyone re-thinking
pathogens and what high-risk really means.
" Peanut butter wasn't considered a high-risk food before
that because it is a low water activity product, " said
Meaghan Meyer, senior vice president of food safety and
FSMA DEMANDS
BAKING INDUSTRY PROVE ITS KILL STEP
When it comes to food safety, the baking
industry has always been lucky in that it has a
built-in kill step: the oven or sometimes a fryer.
Conventional wisdom in the past said that anything
that could cause a foodborne illness in
dough or batter would be killed off in the high
temperatures. Most of the food safety concerns
in bakeries have revolved around foreign materials
and allergens.
" For bakery, most recalls are around allergen
issues and mislabeling rather than pathogens, "
said Rasma Zvaners, vice president, regulatory
and technical services, American Bakers
Association.
The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA),
however, required the industry to prove it.
This launched a joint initiative between AIB
International, ABA, Kansas State University
and the University of Georgia to develop killstep
validation of bakery products.
" It allows bakers to demonstrate that the
baking step is meeting FSMA's control requirement, "
said Judi Lazaro, senior category director,
food safety, AIB International.
The kill-step validation uses a data logger to
register internal product temperature during
baking. An Excel spreadsheet and formula
calculates the log reduction in pathogens present.
The validation method is offered as a free
download on AIB International's website.
" We offer it as a free tool to the industry;
food safety shouldn't be proprietary, " Ms.
Lazaro said.
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Baking & Snack - September 2021

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