Full traceability: FDA proposes a blueprint for a new era of smarter food safety

02 May 2019 --- Today’s technology-focused world has morphed the way society operates, creating a highly complex and globally interconnected landscape that is fundamentally changing the way foods move from farm-to-table. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced a new era of smarter food safety, which will address several areas, including traceability, digital technologies and evolving food business models, to augment its efforts implementing important Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) requirements.

Thanks to the advances in this space, a wide variety of foods are now available to US consumers conveniently, year-round and at affordable prices. But it doesn’t stop here. FDA Commissioner Ned Sharpless, M.D., and Deputy Commissioner Frank Yiannas expects to see more innovation in agriculture, food production, and food distribution systems “over the next decade compared to the last 20 years.” This will continue to provide an even greater variety of food options and delivery conveniences to US consumers, they say. 

The FDA has already made great strides modernizing and further safeguarding the US food supply chain with the implementation of the FDA FSMA. Since it was signed into law in 2011, the FDA has proposed and finalized critical regulations that have established science- and risk-based standards for the production and transportation of domestic and imported foods. 

It has also leveraged technology to advance food safety, particularly in the use of new analytical tools. For example, the agency has developed and led the domestic and international effort to build a first-of-its-kind network of labs that can sequence the genomes of foodborne pathogens. Known as the GenomeTrakr Network, this new tool is a “paradigm-changing development” to facilitate foodborne outbreak investigations, according to the FDA.

“New Era of Smarter Food Safety” 
While these new regulations and developments have enhanced the oversight of food supply and its safety to a level on par with the nation’s growing needs, the FDA recognizes that it’s time to look to the future of food safety. 

Food traceability
When it comes to food traceability, many in the food system utilize a largely paper-based system of taking one step forward to identify where the food has gone and one step back to identify the source. 

The use of new and evolving digital technologies could play a pivotal role in tracing the origin of contaminated food to its source in minutes, or even seconds, instead of days or weeks, when contamination does occur. Access to information during an outbreak about the origin of contaminated food will help the FDA conduct more timely root cause analysis and apply these learnings to prevent future incidents. 

To help accomplish this goal, a new era of smarter food safety work will explore opportunities and specific actions to evaluate new technologies and upgrade the ability to track and trace food through the supply chain rapidly. 

Digital technologies
Tracing is only one area where technology can enhance food safety. The FDA will also be looking at how to leverage emerging technologies and other approaches that are being used in society and business sectors. These include distributed ledgers, sensors, the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI). It will assess how these technologies could create a more digital, transparent and safer food system. This would also address consumer demands for quick access to information about where their foods come from, how it’s produced and if the food is the subject of an ongoing recall.

The FDA is also planning a new pilot that will leverage AI and machine learning to explore new ways to enhance the agency’s review of imported foods at ports of entry to ensure they meet US food safety standards. The number of import food lines is increasing year after year and applying the best predictive and analytical tools will help ensure the most considerable risks to protect consumers are being targeted, the agency reports.

Evolving food business models
With the rise in e-commerce of food, the way food gets from farm-to-home continues to evolve. As customers are increasingly asking for food to be delivered to their homes, there are new methods, packaging materials, temperature control approaches and nodes in the e-commerce food delivery system. These evolving business models present food safety challenges as well as novel considerations around regulatory framework and oversight at the federal, state and local level. The FDA’s Blueprint will discuss areas for collaboration in this space as it works to identify the appropriate standard of care in this rapidly growing sector.

In March, the FDA proposed new funding across multiple aspects of US food safety systems and announced they were seeking to invest in preventing problems by solidifying the agency’s tools under the FSMA. 

In February, the FDA unveiled a strategy to advance its food safety mission and modernize the oversight of imported food. The strategy was part of an overhaul to improve food safety in the supply chain and comes as the quantity of imported foods into the US continues to increase.

The new strategies are highly warranted given serious recent events. For example, in November 2018, the FDA completed a full investigation into the country’s largest E.coli outbreak in more than a decade where five people died and scores of others were sick as a result of the food contamination. The probe provided an overview of factors that potentially contributed to the contamination of romaine lettuce with E. coli O157:H7 that has been implicated in the multistate foodborne illness outbreak.