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The Raw Risks
Amazing Article I wanted to share with you all.
qsrmagazine.com
-------------------------------------------------------------
Experts say simple practices can make quick-serves safer from food-borne illnesses found in produce.
By Blair Chancey
Raw produce can bring risk to restaurant menus.
In late October 2006 the small college town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, found itself infected. Within a week a small-scale E. coli outbreak was underway. By November 10, there were nine confirmed cases of E. coli all tracing back to the same McAlister’s Deli near the town’s university. The day the outbreaks are thought to have began, however, was also the day the restaurant was inspected by the local health department and given an A grade of 91 points. Something seemed to be amiss with the restaurant, the inspectors, and perhaps the industry as a whole.
Recently, food-safety issues are grabbing more headlines than ever. From Chapel Hill’s McAlister’s Deli to ConAgra’s Sylvester, Georgia, processing plant, the restaurant industry seems to have become a sitting duck in the fight against food-borne illnesses. But quick-serves aren’t ready to throw in the towel just yet. After surviving Jack in the Box’s deadly 1993 E. coli outbreak and Taco Bell’s recent shredded-lettuce scare, the fast-food industry has begun to educate itself in order to protect its customers and bottom line.
Safe Practices
Director of Science and Regulatory Relations for the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation (NRAEF), Kristie Grzywinski, says areas like sanitation, supply-chain practices, and holding temperatures are all areas where contaminations are easily introduced. “Really a lot of it is just making sure you have good practices in your establishments,” she says.
Dr. Peter Snyder, Hospitality Institute of Technology & Management president, says one of those good practices is trusting your instincts when picking suppliers, especially for produce.
“If he’s stupid enough to come in a filthy truck that means there’s bad management,” he says. And that could mean trouble or even a potential outbreak for restaurants having their food supplied by the company. Most importantly, Snyder says only buy from suppliers who get their products from approved sources. He says going to the site to see the operation makes this decision easier. Also, he suggests scheduling food deliveries for off-peak hours so that there is ample time to inspect the food and packaging for problems and potential hazards.
In addition to securing safe and clean suppliers, quick-serves should also concentrate on holding temperatures when trying to avoid food-borne illnesses. Dr. Don Schaffner, a professor of microbiology at Rutgers University who has worked with the International Association for Food Protection, The Institute of Food Technologists, and the Society for Risk Analysis, emphasizes holding temperatures’ importance.
“Foods that are supposed to be held cold are not being held cold enough,” Schaffner says. “Foods that are supposed to be held warm or cooked are not being cooked enough.” The NRAEF calls this type of treatment “time-temperature abuse” and says it can occur when the food is stored, cooked and reheated, or even cooled. The foundation’s Grzywinski says that cross-contamination and hygiene are also two vital areas where food safety should be ensured.
“It’s important that [managers] understand how cross-contamination can occur and train their employees on how to prevent that,” Grzywinski says. She advises keeping meat and poultry separate and properly washing produce and hands.
Fruits and vegetables caused 13 percent of the outbreaks and 21 percent of the related illnesses.
Snyder says to pay close attention to the cleanliness of vegetables and produce because there are few chances for bacteria to be killed off with high cooking temperatures since they are usually eaten raw. As a result, he says it’s important for growers to maintain high hygiene standards as well as ensure that outside contamination does not occur. “There really is nothing you can do with fruits and vegetables,” he says. “You’re supposed to pick carrots out of the ground and strawberries off the vine. I better grow them clean then.”
International Farms
In light of recent health-conscious trends, Americans are looking for more menu items that contain fresh fruits and vegetables. Snyder’s concerns about the raw state of such foods were echoed in a recent study conducted by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CPSI) that documented 5,000 food-borne illnesses. According to the results, fruits and vegetables caused 13 percent of the outbreaks and 21 percent of the related illnesses.
Raw produce can bring risk to restaurant menus.
With those kinds of numbers, no one in the supply chain is safe from scrutiny. Most recently a critical eye has turned to farms outside of the U.S. that supply American restaurants. “We’re used to seeing strawberries in our market all year round,” Grzywinski says. “That means these produce items are coming from different areas of not only the [U.S.] but around the world.”
According to a March 12 statement made before the Senate Appropriations Committee by the center’s director, Caroline Smith DeWaal, a 2003 Hepatitis A outbreak sickened 555 people, killed three, and eventually was traced to a Mexican farm where contamination with human waste was “likely.” That incident was among four similar outbreaks described during DeWaal’s testimony, where contaminations from Mexico and Guatemala spread across state lines and even into Canada affecting thousands of people.
Grzywinski says past outbreaks originating outside the country most likely occurred because Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) were not followed. The GAP program is a Cornell University-based initiative devoted to reducing microbial risks in fruits and vegetables. “Those farms might not have been familiar with those practices that the farms in the United States have,” she says.
In addition, according to the CSPI, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) only inspects about 1 percent of food entering the U.S. As a result, the center is supporting the creation of The Safe Food Act that would give the U.S. government the authority to evaluate and certify a country’s food safety program.
Budget Cuts
Programs like the one suggested by DeWaal face an overwhelming job with minimal resources, however. While the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) oversees the safety of meat, poultry, and egg products, the FDA is responsible for virtually all other foods, including produce and vegetables. In the 2008 budget proposal, the USDA is set to receive $270 million in new money for food safety, but the FDA will only get $10.6 million.
“The bottom line is that we’ve seen the food-safety part of the FDA. We’ve seen their budget cut, and that’s not a good thing,” Schaffner says. “They need more resources, they need more scientists, they need the ability to go out there and find the cause of these problems.”
A report compiled by California’s Rep. Henry Waxman in 2006 found that since 2003 the number of FDA field inspectors dropped by 12 percent and since 1972 the FDA has reduced its number of yearly inspections from about 50,000 to 13,567 in 2003. Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson told The Associated Press in February that since Sept. 11, Congress has pushed for more food inspections to better ensure national security and that has added to the agency’s burden. “Now it’s worse, because there are more inspections to do—more facilities—and more food coming into America,” Thompson said.
Technology Solutions
Despite the risks from farms not following GAPs, modern technology can keep store managers abreast on the safety of in-store products says Jim Melvin, chief strategy officer of PAR Technology which provides systems and service integration solutions for the quick-serve industry.
“We’re looking at ServSafe and making sure that the reports for all of our technologies match that,” Melvin says. Hygiene is the area where Melvin predicts the demand for technology to increase the most. He forecasts there will be an increase in federal legislation over back-of-the-house hygiene practices, and quick-serves will be looking for ways to use technology to enforce the new rules.
Although PAR Technology’s current hygiene system is too expensive to be implemented in stores now, the company continues to create ways to track employment hygiene in preparation for when the price drops. “We’ve got a system today that is actually an RFID badge that goes on the employee and basically gets a light on it that’s red, yellow, or green and if you’re green that means your hands are clean,” Melvin says.
Raw produce can bring risk to restaurant menus.
Once an employee enters a restricted area or fails to wash his hands after two hours, the badge turns to red and notifies the manager. “We want to apply a lot of peer pressure,” Melvin says. “Until he stands in front of the hand-washing device… he’s not going to be green again.”
Technology can also combat the language barriers that often exist in the back of the house. Melvin’s product will prompt employees in seven languages and the NRAEF’s ServSafe program is available in English, Chinese, Spanish, and Korean.
Melvin did warn, however, that while technology can help secure food from the packaging center to the dining room table, there is little that can be done if the contamination occurs on the farms. “In an E. coli outbreak, any technologies that are recommended by the Food and Drug Administration and the ServSafe program, none of those are really going to come into play when you have a contamination that occurs in the growing fields,” he says.
Sudden Outbreaks
Whether contamination occurs at the farm, on the truck, or in the kitchen, all eyes turn to the restaurant. Fred Gordon, lead counsel for Jack in the Box in its 1998 lost-profits case against Vons Monfort Meats, says that’s why it’s important for stores to be open and honest.
“The best thing that the company can do is come out and say ‘We have a problem, and we’re doing everything that we can to identify the problem,’” he says. Gordon suggests using the media to let customers know that the company is concerned about their safety.
“You want to make sure that your customers know that you’re doing something to protect them which might include changing suppliers, shutting down restaurants, or notifying potential injured persons to contact the company,” he says.
Although sick customers are the clear victims in outbreaks, Gordon says on a different level, restaurants are too. He says that damage to the brand is the No.1 loss and it manifests itself in lost sales. “For example, in the Jack in the Box outbreak, we collected $60 million to begin with because of lost profits,” he says.
Gordon admits that responsibility lies on everyone in the supply chain to maintain the safety of the food but says just because the spotlight falls on the restaurants, farms should not ignore the important role they play in creating a safe product from the start.
“They want to feel free to put poison out into the public domain and then act as if everyone is supposed to clean up their mess because they believe it’s difficult for them to provide safe and wholesome food,” Melvin says of farms. “Well, I don’t agree with that concept at all.”
Future Regulation
As the issue of food safety garners more media and consumer attention, government intervention seems to be the logical next step in preventing outbreaks. But questions of self-regulation within the industry have also started to arise.
“This spinach outbreak really was a wake-up call for a lot of people much in the same way that the Jack in the Box outbreak of E. coli in hamburger was a wake-up call for the meat industry,” Rutger’s Schaffner says.
Grzywinski, of the NRAEF, says that the produce industry, as a result, “is taking a step forward and making sure that they’re really on the ball.”
For example, Fresh Express, which has not been linked to any outbreaks, will provide $2 million to fund multidisciplinary research of the E. coli 0157:H7 pathogen—the cause of numerous outbreaks. And they will also share the research publicly in hopes of ensuring safety throughout the industry.
Gordon, however, says that the motivations for changes are financial. He says changes in the meat industry did not come from the federal level, but instead were enforced because companies were worried about being sued by victims. “It’s, in my opinion, solely driven by economics,” he says. “We have plenty of laws already on the books that if there were sufficient resources to actually police the entities, we’d be great.”
qsrmagazine.com
-------------------------------------------------------------
Experts say simple practices can make quick-serves safer from food-borne illnesses found in produce.
By Blair Chancey
Raw produce can bring risk to restaurant menus.
In late October 2006 the small college town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, found itself infected. Within a week a small-scale E. coli outbreak was underway. By November 10, there were nine confirmed cases of E. coli all tracing back to the same McAlister’s Deli near the town’s university. The day the outbreaks are thought to have began, however, was also the day the restaurant was inspected by the local health department and given an A grade of 91 points. Something seemed to be amiss with the restaurant, the inspectors, and perhaps the industry as a whole.
Recently, food-safety issues are grabbing more headlines than ever. From Chapel Hill’s McAlister’s Deli to ConAgra’s Sylvester, Georgia, processing plant, the restaurant industry seems to have become a sitting duck in the fight against food-borne illnesses. But quick-serves aren’t ready to throw in the towel just yet. After surviving Jack in the Box’s deadly 1993 E. coli outbreak and Taco Bell’s recent shredded-lettuce scare, the fast-food industry has begun to educate itself in order to protect its customers and bottom line.
Safe Practices
Director of Science and Regulatory Relations for the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation (NRAEF), Kristie Grzywinski, says areas like sanitation, supply-chain practices, and holding temperatures are all areas where contaminations are easily introduced. “Really a lot of it is just making sure you have good practices in your establishments,” she says.
Dr. Peter Snyder, Hospitality Institute of Technology & Management president, says one of those good practices is trusting your instincts when picking suppliers, especially for produce.
“If he’s stupid enough to come in a filthy truck that means there’s bad management,” he says. And that could mean trouble or even a potential outbreak for restaurants having their food supplied by the company. Most importantly, Snyder says only buy from suppliers who get their products from approved sources. He says going to the site to see the operation makes this decision easier. Also, he suggests scheduling food deliveries for off-peak hours so that there is ample time to inspect the food and packaging for problems and potential hazards.
In addition to securing safe and clean suppliers, quick-serves should also concentrate on holding temperatures when trying to avoid food-borne illnesses. Dr. Don Schaffner, a professor of microbiology at Rutgers University who has worked with the International Association for Food Protection, The Institute of Food Technologists, and the Society for Risk Analysis, emphasizes holding temperatures’ importance.
“Foods that are supposed to be held cold are not being held cold enough,” Schaffner says. “Foods that are supposed to be held warm or cooked are not being cooked enough.” The NRAEF calls this type of treatment “time-temperature abuse” and says it can occur when the food is stored, cooked and reheated, or even cooled. The foundation’s Grzywinski says that cross-contamination and hygiene are also two vital areas where food safety should be ensured.
“It’s important that [managers] understand how cross-contamination can occur and train their employees on how to prevent that,” Grzywinski says. She advises keeping meat and poultry separate and properly washing produce and hands.
Fruits and vegetables caused 13 percent of the outbreaks and 21 percent of the related illnesses.
Snyder says to pay close attention to the cleanliness of vegetables and produce because there are few chances for bacteria to be killed off with high cooking temperatures since they are usually eaten raw. As a result, he says it’s important for growers to maintain high hygiene standards as well as ensure that outside contamination does not occur. “There really is nothing you can do with fruits and vegetables,” he says. “You’re supposed to pick carrots out of the ground and strawberries off the vine. I better grow them clean then.”
International Farms
In light of recent health-conscious trends, Americans are looking for more menu items that contain fresh fruits and vegetables. Snyder’s concerns about the raw state of such foods were echoed in a recent study conducted by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CPSI) that documented 5,000 food-borne illnesses. According to the results, fruits and vegetables caused 13 percent of the outbreaks and 21 percent of the related illnesses.
Raw produce can bring risk to restaurant menus.
With those kinds of numbers, no one in the supply chain is safe from scrutiny. Most recently a critical eye has turned to farms outside of the U.S. that supply American restaurants. “We’re used to seeing strawberries in our market all year round,” Grzywinski says. “That means these produce items are coming from different areas of not only the [U.S.] but around the world.”
According to a March 12 statement made before the Senate Appropriations Committee by the center’s director, Caroline Smith DeWaal, a 2003 Hepatitis A outbreak sickened 555 people, killed three, and eventually was traced to a Mexican farm where contamination with human waste was “likely.” That incident was among four similar outbreaks described during DeWaal’s testimony, where contaminations from Mexico and Guatemala spread across state lines and even into Canada affecting thousands of people.
Grzywinski says past outbreaks originating outside the country most likely occurred because Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) were not followed. The GAP program is a Cornell University-based initiative devoted to reducing microbial risks in fruits and vegetables. “Those farms might not have been familiar with those practices that the farms in the United States have,” she says.
In addition, according to the CSPI, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) only inspects about 1 percent of food entering the U.S. As a result, the center is supporting the creation of The Safe Food Act that would give the U.S. government the authority to evaluate and certify a country’s food safety program.
Budget Cuts
Programs like the one suggested by DeWaal face an overwhelming job with minimal resources, however. While the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) oversees the safety of meat, poultry, and egg products, the FDA is responsible for virtually all other foods, including produce and vegetables. In the 2008 budget proposal, the USDA is set to receive $270 million in new money for food safety, but the FDA will only get $10.6 million.
“The bottom line is that we’ve seen the food-safety part of the FDA. We’ve seen their budget cut, and that’s not a good thing,” Schaffner says. “They need more resources, they need more scientists, they need the ability to go out there and find the cause of these problems.”
A report compiled by California’s Rep. Henry Waxman in 2006 found that since 2003 the number of FDA field inspectors dropped by 12 percent and since 1972 the FDA has reduced its number of yearly inspections from about 50,000 to 13,567 in 2003. Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson told The Associated Press in February that since Sept. 11, Congress has pushed for more food inspections to better ensure national security and that has added to the agency’s burden. “Now it’s worse, because there are more inspections to do—more facilities—and more food coming into America,” Thompson said.
Technology Solutions
Despite the risks from farms not following GAPs, modern technology can keep store managers abreast on the safety of in-store products says Jim Melvin, chief strategy officer of PAR Technology which provides systems and service integration solutions for the quick-serve industry.
“We’re looking at ServSafe and making sure that the reports for all of our technologies match that,” Melvin says. Hygiene is the area where Melvin predicts the demand for technology to increase the most. He forecasts there will be an increase in federal legislation over back-of-the-house hygiene practices, and quick-serves will be looking for ways to use technology to enforce the new rules.
Although PAR Technology’s current hygiene system is too expensive to be implemented in stores now, the company continues to create ways to track employment hygiene in preparation for when the price drops. “We’ve got a system today that is actually an RFID badge that goes on the employee and basically gets a light on it that’s red, yellow, or green and if you’re green that means your hands are clean,” Melvin says.
Raw produce can bring risk to restaurant menus.
Once an employee enters a restricted area or fails to wash his hands after two hours, the badge turns to red and notifies the manager. “We want to apply a lot of peer pressure,” Melvin says. “Until he stands in front of the hand-washing device… he’s not going to be green again.”
Technology can also combat the language barriers that often exist in the back of the house. Melvin’s product will prompt employees in seven languages and the NRAEF’s ServSafe program is available in English, Chinese, Spanish, and Korean.
Melvin did warn, however, that while technology can help secure food from the packaging center to the dining room table, there is little that can be done if the contamination occurs on the farms. “In an E. coli outbreak, any technologies that are recommended by the Food and Drug Administration and the ServSafe program, none of those are really going to come into play when you have a contamination that occurs in the growing fields,” he says.
Sudden Outbreaks
Whether contamination occurs at the farm, on the truck, or in the kitchen, all eyes turn to the restaurant. Fred Gordon, lead counsel for Jack in the Box in its 1998 lost-profits case against Vons Monfort Meats, says that’s why it’s important for stores to be open and honest.
“The best thing that the company can do is come out and say ‘We have a problem, and we’re doing everything that we can to identify the problem,’” he says. Gordon suggests using the media to let customers know that the company is concerned about their safety.
“You want to make sure that your customers know that you’re doing something to protect them which might include changing suppliers, shutting down restaurants, or notifying potential injured persons to contact the company,” he says.
Although sick customers are the clear victims in outbreaks, Gordon says on a different level, restaurants are too. He says that damage to the brand is the No.1 loss and it manifests itself in lost sales. “For example, in the Jack in the Box outbreak, we collected $60 million to begin with because of lost profits,” he says.
Gordon admits that responsibility lies on everyone in the supply chain to maintain the safety of the food but says just because the spotlight falls on the restaurants, farms should not ignore the important role they play in creating a safe product from the start.
“They want to feel free to put poison out into the public domain and then act as if everyone is supposed to clean up their mess because they believe it’s difficult for them to provide safe and wholesome food,” Melvin says of farms. “Well, I don’t agree with that concept at all.”
Future Regulation
As the issue of food safety garners more media and consumer attention, government intervention seems to be the logical next step in preventing outbreaks. But questions of self-regulation within the industry have also started to arise.
“This spinach outbreak really was a wake-up call for a lot of people much in the same way that the Jack in the Box outbreak of E. coli in hamburger was a wake-up call for the meat industry,” Rutger’s Schaffner says.
Grzywinski, of the NRAEF, says that the produce industry, as a result, “is taking a step forward and making sure that they’re really on the ball.”
For example, Fresh Express, which has not been linked to any outbreaks, will provide $2 million to fund multidisciplinary research of the E. coli 0157:H7 pathogen—the cause of numerous outbreaks. And they will also share the research publicly in hopes of ensuring safety throughout the industry.
Gordon, however, says that the motivations for changes are financial. He says changes in the meat industry did not come from the federal level, but instead were enforced because companies were worried about being sued by victims. “It’s, in my opinion, solely driven by economics,” he says. “We have plenty of laws already on the books that if there were sufficient resources to actually police the entities, we’d be great.”
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