WASHINGTON (PRWEB) August 13, 2021
One year after FDA released the New Era for Smarter Food Safety Blueprint, Vidya Ananth, VP of Food Safety and Quality at Novolyze, moderated a roundtable on the subject at the International Association for Food Protection (IAFP) Annual Meeting held in Phoenix, AZ and online in July. The panel included Food Safety experts from US FDA, Nathan Anderson and Andrew Kennedy, and from leading food manufacturers; Pamela Wilger from Cargill, Aaron Asmus from Hormel Foods and Derrick Bautista from Del Monte Foods.
One year after the Blueprint release, how is the industry embracing this change? How are the regulatory agencies and auditing bodies viewing this, and how are they supporting this technology-based approach?
The panelists from the food companies admitted that a lot of the work they do is still paper based. While they all can see the benefits of digitalization; not just moving from paper to a digital format but using modeling and algorithms to have a more proactive approach to food safety; they agree that this change is a process, and it cannot be done overnight. A key point is to find the right digital tool which will address the company’s specific needs and will be able handle the magnitude of heterogeneous data that food safety professionals have to deal with and the tool must be capable of integrating and interfacing with other existing ecosystems
For Nathan Anderson and Andrew Kennedy, this first year of FDA’s New Era of Smarter Food Safety was a bootstrap year, when groups of experts took a lot of different initiatives and concepts and started to talk about what the greater picture for the New Era could look like. To push the initiative forward, Janet Woodcock, M.D., announced in July an increase in budget of $44.8M in 2022 compared to 2021, “that’s a fantastic vote of confidence in the work that we are doing, and we will be able to build on the things we worked on in the past year” said Andrew Kennedy.
About FDA’s New Era of Smarter Food Safety: The world around us is changing rapidly; many believe we will see more changes in the food system over the next 10 years than we have in decades. Foods are being reformulated; there are new foods, new production methods, and new delivery methods; and the system is becoming increasingly digitized. To keep pace with this evolution, FDA is taking a new approach to food safety, leveraging technology and other tools to create a safer and more digital, traceable food system. Smarter food safety is about more than just technology. It's also about simpler, more effective, and modern approaches and processes. It's about leadership, creativity, and culture. Our ultimate goal is to bend the curve of foodborne illness in this country by reducing the number of illnesses.
About Novolyze: Novolyze empowers food and beverage companies to enhance food safety and quality performance and compliance in a rapidly changing environment. We offer application-driven, tech-enabled solutions to activate a groundbreaking, holistic approach to food safety and quality. We leverage the power of IoT and cloud-computing to unify food safety and quality data, transform them into actionable insights, and enable real-time decision-making. For more information about Novolyze, please visit novolyze.com.