Which is safer: local produce or produce that has been shipped from outside your area? Which is safer: produce from small growers or large growers? Which is safer: produce grown in the United States or produce that is imported?

These are questions I posed recently to more than 300 dietitians on a webinar PMA helped sponsor for members of the American Dietetic Association (ADA). Of course, the point was that none of that matters. Pathogens and contamination are equal-opportunity offenders, and they don’t respect distance to market, size of operation, or borders.

This webinar allowed us to do polls, and the responses from the dietitians were both better and worse than I expected. On the first two questions (local vs. non-local and small vs. large) there were votes on both sides. However, on the U.S.-grown vs. imports, the answer was staggering. Ninety-nine percent said U.S.-grown product was safer than imports. And these dietitians are key consumer influencers. They may be dealing directly with consumers, or they may be making critical decisions for companies, health care providers, etc., about the foods those companies offer.

I explained to the group that government tests have shown very similar low contamination rates for imported and U.S.-grown product. And I reminded them of (again rare) outbreaks that were traced back to both U.S.-grown and imported produce. Given how much our industry relies on imports to supply consumers’ desire for year-round abundance of fresh produce, it’s essential that we continue to get the word out.

In letters sent last week to Senate Finance Committee and House Ways and Means Committee leadership, PMA urged the U.S. Congress to move quickly on trade legislation that is now pending. Specifically, we asked for immediate resolution on the Free Trade Agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea, and extension of the Andean Trade Preference and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA).

In the letters, PMA President and CEO Bryan Silbermann noted that “free and fair trade and a level playing field across the globe are important to our U.S. and non-U.S. members. The three free trade agreements offer opportunities for new export markets and they are long overdue. Similarly, the current ATPDEA has expired, forcing U.S. importers to pay duties on Colombian and Ecuadorian flowers, and we strongly support Senator McCain’s legislation (S. 380) and Chairman Camp’s legislation (H.R. 622) to extend the provisions and remove the tariffs.”

You can learn more about free trade agreements at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. Or, if you want specifics, you can find a wealth of resources on the agreements for South Korea, Colombia, and Panama.

Sometimes it can be difficult to navigate massive government web sites. As part of our daily work, PMA’s Government Relations team maintains a number of strong working relationships with many U.S. government regulatory agencies. We frequently offer comments to these agencies and share our expertise on specific issues as needed.

We also help our members connect with these agencies when they have questions about regulatory issues. To that end, we have compiled overviews to give our members easy access to finding the information they need. If you, the member, cannot find what you need via the PMA website, you can always send us an e-mail and we will be happy to help you.

In today’s Federal Register, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced a public meeting entitled “FDA Food Safety Modernization Act: Focus on Inspections and Compliance,” which will be held Monday, June 6 at FDA’s White Oak campus. The meeting’s purpose is to discuss implementation of inspections and compliance under the recently enacted FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA).

Industry and public stakeholders will have an opportunity to provide information and share views that will inform FDA’s FSMA implementation strategies relative to enforcement authorities; frequency and targeting of facility inspections; manner of inspection in a preventive controls environment; and improving the reportable food registry. PMA will be attending this meeting and offering oral testimony.

Also, FDA recently opened a docket to obtain information about preventive controls and other practices used by facilities to identify and address hazards associated with specific types of food and specific processes. FDA established this docket to provide an opportunity for interested parties to provide information and share views that will inform the development of guidance on preventive controls for food facilities that manufacture, process, pack, or hold human food or animal food/feed.

Comments on FSMA inspection and compliance strategies are due to FDA by July 6. Comments on the preventive controls open docket are due to FDA by August 22.

You might recall that FDA held a public meeting on preventive controls for facilities and a call for comments, and, last Friday, we submitted our thoughts to the agency on the topic. PMA will continue to work in collaboration with FDA by offering comments as the agency develops regulations and guidance related to the FSMA.

You can see all of our FSMA activities to date by visiting the PMA website.

A recent online Harris Poll revealed that, when purchasing food and beverages, U.S. adults are aware of basic nutritional facts of these products and how to manage their weight. A closer look at the results shows that as Americans age, they develop stronger purchasing preferences and habits with regard to healthier choices.

Matures (66+ years old) are the most likely of all generations to pay close attention to nutritional facts and translate their health consciousness into behavior, possibly because they are more likely to need to follow a diet with specific restrictions, such as with low salt and sugar. The differences in eating habits among age groups suggest that actual behavioral change may, to some extent, be more driven by necessity than by knowledge. In addition, the poll found:

• At least three-quarters of all U.S. adults place importance on fresh (89 percent), fiber (81 percent), whole grains (81 percent), fat content (80 percent), portion size (79 percent), calories (77 percent) and saturated fat (76 percent) when making food and beverage purchases.
• At least seven out of 10 of all U.S. adults place importance on consumption of protein (83 percent), fat (81 percent), whole grains (81 percent), calories (80 percent), saturated fat (79 percent), sugar (76 percent), cholesterol (75 percent), carbohydrates (74 percent), and sodium (73 percent) when thinking of how they manage their diet and/or weight.

These findings are similar to PMA’s 2010 Identifying Consumer Trends in the Produce Category report. It found that there are distinct shopping patterns that are significant to producers and sellers in the fruit and vegetable industry: the percentage of consumers acknowledging the importance of including produce in their diets, as well as a focus on freshness and avoidance of preservatives and additives.

On the nutrition front, consumers were asked to rank the top three reasons why they purchase fruits and vegetables. In both the 2010 and 2009 studies, “eating healthier” was the top answer. The margin was slightly higher in 2010 with 64 percent selecting this answer versus 61 percent in 2009. Likewise, a “good source of vitamins and minerals” ranked second in both years. However, this answer experienced a strong increase in consumer response, moving up from 43 percent in 2009 to 51 percent in 2010.

PMA members who want to learn more about the Identifying Consumer Trends in the Produce Category study are encouraged to visit our Consumer Research Center (Note: member log-in is required to view the report). While there, you can also read companion pieces to this study authored by The Perishables Group.

In addition, check out the spring 2011 edition of PMA’s Fresh magazine, which focuses on consumer trends.

On June 1, PMA members and industry leaders will have an opportunity to hear the latest consumer trends and what the strategic and practical implications are for their businesses during PMA’s Fresh Connections: St. Louis. (Note: since this post published on Tuesday, PMA has decided to postpone this event until later this year.)

Lorna Christie, PMA’s Executive Vice President/Chief Operating Officer, will discuss current consumer profiles and offer a forecast of future consumers and examination of those trends’ impact on fresh fruit and vegetable consumption. Following her presentation, participants will hear from industry buyers’ business responses to current trends.

Following lunch, there will be a small group activity (a marketing audit) where attendees can gauge how their businesses are providing what today’s consumers need. For more information or to register, visit the PMA website.

In comments submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last Friday regarding its call for stakeholder feedback on preventive controls for facilities as required by the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), PMA noted that risk assessment or hazard analysis is the foundation for building comprehensive food safety programs. We encouraged FDA to, as it begins work to develop rules and/or guidance on hazard analysis and preventive controls, use industry and academic experts – along with the agency’s existing resources (e.g. the fresh-cut guidance) as these provide a framework from which to build new guidance. We also urged FDA to focus on the desired outcomes, not the procedures to get there to avoid stifling innovation and burdening smaller operations.

The issue of product/microbial testing was also addressed in our comments. To that end, we stated that FDA should work with the food industry, testing laboratories and method certification authorities to identify research needs to improve and validate risk-based pathogen testing methods.

With respect to training and guidance on preventive controls, we recommended that FDA work with the produce industry to develop a comprehensive communication strategy on preventive controls so that facilities operators understand their roles, expectations of them, and where they can go to find the information they need to meet those demands.

For complete details, read our full comments to FDA. These comments were submitted in direct response to the public meeting FDA held April 20, which we attended.

We’ll continue to provide industry insight to FDA as it works to implement the FSMA and let you know of upcoming meetings and comment opportunities. We heard last Thursday that FDA is planning a public meeting June 6 on the inspection and compliance aspects of the FSMA; we’ll let you know more here via Field to Fork once the official Federal Register notice is issued.

Sometimes you can be hurt by what you believe to be true that is not, said Rick Funston, of Funston Advisory Service, LLC, at an agroterrorism meeting in late April. He cited events such as the Japan earthquake/tsunami, the Gulf oil disaster, the Icelandic volcano, and the Wall Street crash. “Shift happens” was his mantra as he noted that accelerating changes are inevitable but unpredictable.

Rick said that we all have mental models of how we see the world, and just because we haven’t seen something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. If you’ve been doing something for a long time, you’re more inclined to keep doing it, he said, even if the environment is telling you otherwise. He offered some tips for risk intelligence:

• Check your assumptions about the “knowns” and assume the opposite to see what would be true if something cataclysmic happened. Or look at the “opposites” as potential opportunities. Think the unthinkable.
• Maintain vigilance on signal detection and pattern recognition.
• Manage key connections: suppliers, systems, etc. How critical is each? How long can you go without it? What is the recovery time?
• Factor in velocity and momentum: How bad can it get and how fast?
• Anticipate causes of failure – company-specific and process-specific.
• Verify sources and corroborate your information.
• Maintain a margin of safety.
• Spend time looking farther out.
• Take enough of the right risks – the United States is becoming a more risk-averse place.
• Develop and sustain operational discipline.

Rick told many stories, two of which I’ll mention here. Speaking about operational discipline, he noted the DuPont company had to build confidence in the public when it decided to build a gunpowder factory in the community. They built their family home within the “kill zone” of the factory, and they would not let a factory operate until it had been operated first by a family member and then by a senior executive.

The other was a story of how complacency kills. In Aneyoshi, Japan, he noted, there are 600-year-old markers that say: “Remember the calamities of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”

Of course, below that point was the disaster area, disguised as great beachfront property.

Is your company ready for an uncertain future? Are you reading the tea leaves correctly? And if the worst happens, how will you recover?

At a late-April International Symposium on Agroterrorism, speaker Rick Funston of Funston Advisory Service, LLC, addressed 600 law enforcement, government, academia, and industry from more than 20 countries on identifying potential threats and preparing your company for them.

Rick noted that the 21st Century will be volatile and unpredictable, and that agriculture will be on the front lines of emerging shifts and shocks. Whether it’s extreme weather, growing demand on resources (especially water), or technology changes (e.g. GMOs), interdependent infrastructures will be affected by disruptions that cascade across networks, sectors, and borders.

He noted that there is no perfect prevention, complex systems are bound to fail, and terrorists will succeed despite our best efforts because they are adaptable. He spoke of pre-emption rather than prevention. He said resilience is the capacity to anticipate and adapt pre-emptively to shocks and shifts, preventing disruption or minimizing its impact and duration – to bounce back after a hit. Resilience, he said, is about managing outcomes, not just causes.

In tomorrow’s post, I’ll review some of the tips Rick offered the group. He urged a different way of thinking about the future, of looking at assumptions in a different way. It was a fascinating approach.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a Feeding America meeting I attended which focused on how the foodbank network plans to increase and improve its national fresh produce program. Coming out of the gathering, the organization has set an ambitious goal to secure and distribute an additional annual one billion pounds of fresh produce by 2015; this represents a 200% increase over today’s base of nearly 500 million pounds.

In order to develop strategies to achieve this goal, the 250 or so of us who gathered in Columbus worked through an adult learning process called appreciative inquiry (which was an interesting concept altogether). In looking back over my notes of ideas presented to the entire group, some themes emerged:

• Some foodbanks face a challenge in receiving and storing fresh produce. A recurring issue was modernization of dock and cooler capacities, particularly ensuring that fresh produce is moved into the cooler (when appropriate for the commodity) as soon as possible.
• Mobile pantries (visualize a refurbished beer truck with multiple sliding doors on each side) present both an opportunity and challenge. The opportunity is that the trucks can quickly get food out into the communities to those in need, whereas the challenges lie in the age of these vehicles and their ability to maintain the cold chain.
• There may be more opportunities to obtain undersized produce that is unable to be sold – due to state marketing orders – and distribute it.

In addition to learning about how foodbank distribution system works, this meeting also changed some preconceived notions I had about how food is procured. Going in, I did not know foodbanks had funds to pay for produce and transportation; I had thought it was a charitable arrangement between the foodbank and supplier with no money transacted.

Here at PMA we’re already taking steps to determine how we can help Feeding America reach its goal. But to help the organization get there, one thing is for sure: it will require creative thinking and innovative ideas from foodbanks, the agencies they serve, and industry partners.

It’s been a while since I’ve highlighted a PMA member’s sustainability efforts here on Field to Fork but recently I received some information from Limoneira on its energy programs. The firm has two solar orchards, one at company headquarters in Santa Paula, California, and one in the Tulare County town of Ducor.

The Santa Paula solar program consists of 5.5-acre photovoltaic orchard that generates a full megawatt of electricity. The energy generated representing one-third of Limoneira’s total use, and it powers a lemon-packing house and storage facility. It represents a reduction of 32,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, which is equivalent of 200 single-family, four-person homes.

The Ducor facility generates another full megawatt of electricity to power 250-horsepower motors that pump deep well water into reservoirs for the irrigation of 1,000 agricultural acres. Also at the Ducor ranch, mechanical tracking systems were incorporated into the design of this project which enable the panels to track the sun to optimize performance.

It is estimated that, over the orchards’ expected lifespan, the power generated will save at least 64,000 tons of greenhouse gases that would have otherwise been emitted by an ordinary oil- or coal-firing power plant.

To learn more about Limoneira’s sustainability programs, visit their website. If you have a sustainability story to share, please let us know. We highlight members’ sustainability stories on the PMA website.