Last week I read a blog post from FDA’s Sharon Natanblut (who was part of the FDA team PMA leaders met with during our June meetings in Washington, DC) in which she highlighted the work the agency is doing to meet with small farmers to better understand their concerns about produce safety, the produce safety rule and the Food Safety Modernization Act, and more.

She noted that “while FDA and its colleagues at USDA bring to the table scientific and public health expertise, we all know that farms are very much the real world of soil, air and water open to the elements 24/7 and worked by humans and animals. Farmers can inform us from their experience and practices… Successful produce safety is possible if farmers and food safety officials work together, listening to each other and learning from each other.”

With regard to small businesses and the FSMA, FDA recently updated its website with a timeline of when small businesses can expect to see guidance documents and related materials. These include:

• Facilities Registration: FDA will issue “plain language” guidance on registration procedures for small entities within six months of issuing the registration rule.
• Hazard Analysis and Preventive Controls: FDA will issue “plain language” guidance for small entities within six months of issuing hazard analysis/preventive control rule. The hazard analysis/preventive control rule will take effect for small businesses six months after its effective date and for very small businesses 18 months after effective date.
• Produce Safety: FDA will issue “plain language” guidance for small businesses within six months of issuing produce safety rule. The produce safety rule will take effect for small businesses one year after its effective date and for very small businesses two years after its effective date.
• Tracking and Tracing: FDA will issue “plain language” guidance for small businesses within six months of issuing rule on tracking and tracing food and recordkeeping. The rule on recordkeeping will take effect for small businesses one year after effective date and for very small businesses two years after effective date.
• Training and Education: FDA will enter into agreement with USDA to establish competitive grant program within the National Institute for Food and Agriculture to provide food safety training, education, extension, outreach, and technical assistance to farmers, small food processors and small fruit and vegetable merchant wholesalers.

On that last bullet point regarding training, PMA offers small grower training to our members. This program addresses the components of a food safety program, how to develop a food safety program, how to conduct a risk assessment, and tracebacks and product recalls. If you work with small growers and would like to have PMA’s food safety team speak to them, please contact Cyndi Clifton here at the office.

In addition, the Produce Safety Alliance (through Cornell University) has established working committees to identify challenges in the areas of understanding and implementing GAPs on farms. If you’d like to get involved in this effort, visit the Alliance website or contact Gretchen Wall at Cornell.

This is the time of year when college classes begin across the country and you hear stories on the news about how to avoid the “freshman 15” weight gain. Last week I read about an Oregon State University study which found that college students aren’t eating enough fruits and vegetables; in fact, students aren’t even eating one serving per day, far from the recommended five daily servings – and nowhere near half a plate.

The study surveyed the eating habits of 582 college students, a majority of which were first-year students from OSU. The study, now online in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, compared male and female students, but found that both were not getting the proper amount of fruits and vegetables. Male students had about five servings a week, slightly higher than female students who self-reported eating about four servings of fruits and vegetables.

Female students had lower fiber intake, while males tended to consume more fat in their diet. Overall, the females had better eating habits, including skipping fewer meals, eating in the college dining halls more frequently, and reading food labels.
Researchers found that students skipped meals fairly frequently, which could account for some of the lack of fruits and veggies – which is interesting because, at OSU, healthful options are available in dining halls.

So as USDA begins to promote the new dietary guidelines and MyPlate, it’ll be important to include colleges and universities among the audiences that need to hear these messages. At least on one campus, there is a lot of work to be done. But the agency should not have to do this alone.

What can our industry do to help and support increased fruit and vegetable consumption on campus? Are produce marketers and on-campus dining facilities reaching out to college students via social media and other channels to let them know of new products, flavors, and meal options?

The Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops will receive one of 52 Conservation Innovation Grants (CIG) from the USDA to advance its work. As you know, the index is a multi-stakeholder initiative to develop a system for measuring sustainable performance throughout the specialty crop supply chain. The project seeks to offer a suite of outcomes-based metrics to enable operators at any point along the supply chain to benchmark, compare, and communicate their own performance.

Through CIG, the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) is investing nearly $22.5 million in innovative conservation technologies and approaches that address a broad array of existing and emerging natural resource issues. NRCS chief Dave White said: “These grants will help some of America’s top agricultural and conservation institutions, foundations and businesses develop unique approaches to enhancing and protecting natural resources on agricultural land. Their creativity and problem-solving will benefit conservation-minded farmers and ranchers, and everyone who relies upon our nation’s natural resources for food and fiber.”

This grant of nearly $762,000 follows a prior grant of $630,000 to work on piloting the metrics. The index received renewal funding to continue an unprecedented collaboration amongst the nation’s most influential grower organizations, NGOs and buyers of specialty crop products.

PMA has supported the index since its inception and serves on the Coordinating Council and Steering Committee. By creating standard metrics for our industry to use in measuring sustainability efforts, we seek to reduce the multiplicity of measuring schemes and demands on companies. To do that, we need continuing input from industry. Check out the website to see how you can be involved in pilots or provide input on the metrics.

Yesterday PMA informed its members that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has placed Mexican papayas on an import alert: Detention Without Physical Examination (DWPE). This means FDA districts may detain, without physical examination, all raw fresh and raw fresh refrigerated papaya offered for entry from the country of Mexico, unless exempted. (More on that exemption protocol at the end of this post.)

This action from FDA was prompted by a series of events. There was an outbreak of foodborne illness caused by Salmonella Agona that was statistically linked to Mexican papaya and affected more than 100 people in multiple states. Tracebacks were conducted in multiple states. FDA also collected samples of papaya to test for the outbreak strain. Based on information from the outbreak investigation, the outbreak has been associated with papaya from at least one grower and its shipper in Mexico.

In addition, FDA has been collecting and analyzing samples of raw, fresh whole papaya imported from Mexico. From mid-May to mid-August, FDA found Salmonella in 33 samples out of a total of 211. FDA stated that the positive samples were from 28 firms and included nearly all the major papaya-producing regions in Mexico. FDA has stated that evidence shows there is widespread contamination of Mexican papaya with Salmonella. Based on these factors, FDA states it is extremely unlikely that the Salmonella Agona outbreak or the elevated rate of positive samples from FDA’s recent tests on Mexican papaya are due to random contamination.

For those Mexican papaya shippers who want to request removal from the DWPE import alert, FDA notes that the importer should provide results of a third-party laboratory analysis, which verifies the product does not contain salmonella. In other words, the company should provide documentation with sufficient evidence that future shipments of their papaya will not be adulterated. FDA says it may consider five consecutive commercial shipments over a period of time, analyzed as described above, as being adequate for removal from DWPE.

FDA has asked for no other action on the part of the industry, unless you are a Mexican papaya shipper that wants to have its loads released for export to the United States (as noted above).

We are providing this information to help our members understand the situation. If you have questions or concerns, please contact PMA staffers Johnna Hepner, +1 (831) 595-0958 (for technical issues) or Kathy Means, +1 (302) 607-2113 (for government/communications issues).

A few weeks ago, PMA President and CEO Bryan Silbermann shared his thoughts on the Center for Produce Safety’s second annual research symposium. In those observations, he addressed the Center’s focus on real-world application of the research results as being of great value to all members of the supply chain. Recently, the CPS released 12 key learnings from the symposium; these are:

• More resilient wash water chemistries are emerging.
• Organic load is a critical factor in wash water systems.
• We may need to re-think our use of oxidation reduction potential (ORP) as a measure to verify a preventive control.
• As more research on wash water systems emerge, industry practices will change to reflect our increased knowledge.
• A “brush-bed wash” system for tomato washing may hold promise.
• Validation is an important concept for the produce industry to consider as we implement preventive controls.
• Zero- valent iron holds promise as a water purification system.
• Attenuated E. coli O157:H7 does not survive in Salinas Valley production environments.
• Produce industry data has “stories to tell.”
• Plant genetics and physiology may play a role in pathogen survival.
• There is still much to be learned about norovirus and produce.
• Microbial populations on Romaine leaves (phyllosphere) may be used to determine if conditions support or antagonize pathogen survival.

For more insight into these key learnings, visit the CPS website. You can also visit our Food Safety Resource Center and the Ask Dr. Bob Whitaker audio blog for more insights on food safety issues.

While traveling home from a meeting in St. Louis earlier this month, I came across an interesting article that examined how retailers are using social media to connect with customers. The July issue of Progressive Grocer noted that 66 percent of retailers responded that they are using social media in some form as part of their engagement strategies. Of these, 100 percent reported using Facebook, 63 percent were using Twitter, 21 percent were using LinkedIn, and nine percent said they were using YouTube.

Ninety-three percent of respondents said they increased their social media marketing efforts in the past year, while 90 percent said that are expecting to increase these efforts in the coming year. However, 65 percent of respondents said they don’t measure the ROI of their social media efforts.

When it came to content, promotions (91 percent) led the way in terms of how retailers are using social media, followed by special events (81 percent), questions for members (67 percent), and contests (54 percent). Interestingly, 56 percent said they incorporate mobile technology into their social media programs; 11 percent said they do so via location-based services (e.g. Foursquare).

PMA has been using a variety of social media platforms (including the ones mentioned above) to reach out to our members. In addition to this blog, we have a Socially Speaking page on our website, which contains links to our Facebook and Twitter accounts. More recently, we published a social-media focused issue of FRESH magazine.

We’ve also offered educational programming; in fact, last week at the Wegman’s Conference Center in New York, we discussed the “Digital Native” and what this demographic means for produce sales and consumption. If you missed this opportunity, we’re holding it next month out in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 15. Visit our website for more details or to register.

Finally, there’s also our YouTube channel that contains a variety of clips – including PMA TV from last year’s Fresh Summit.

Speaking of Fresh Summit, be sure to visit the Fresh Summit video wall for user-generated – and humorous/offbeat – videos highlighting why these leaders are coming to Atlanta in October. If you’re coming to Fresh Summit 2011, submit your own video to the wall!

In mid May, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration 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 did this to give interested parties an opportunity 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. The docket is part of the agency’s ongoing Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) implementation process.

In our comments filed yesterday regarding the docket, PMA recommended that FDA:

• Develop updated guidance on how to conduct a hazard analysis or risk assessment using “real-world” produce examples gleaned from FDA inspections and industry operational experiences. The guidance could become a basic element of operator training as executed through the Produce Safety Alliance.
• Define and validate food/feed safety controls (e.g., information on procedures used to determine that control measures are capable of controlling the identified hazards) to bring uniformity to validation activities and ease interpretation of results.
• Identify sanitation as a point of focus in the food safety rules and guidance under development, with the reality that FDA can only offer a framework around sanitation (e.g. suggest written sanitation procedures, formats for SSOP development, validation of sanitation methods, provision of verification of sanitation, suggest training be provided to employees, etc.) as the specifics for the actual processes need to be the responsibility of the operator.
• Require allergens to be included in hazard analysis, and that SOPs be developed and trained on to ensure proper handling. FDA should also consider how many allergen-related recalls are related to failures to adhere to written food safety programs versus companies not understanding labeling rules or breakdowns in communication when developing packaging artwork.
• Work with the industry to examine the use of microbial testing versus the risks presented and the operational impacts testing would engender. This risk-based approach is consistent with FDA philosophy and will serve to focus industry efforts on contamination risks that represent the highest priorities.

These are just a few of the themes from our comments; you can read them in full on the PMA website. As always, we’ll let our members know when there are opportunities to comment on FDA dockets and proposed rules related to the FSMA.

You can see all of our FSMA activities to date by visiting our FSMA resource page.

A few months ago here on Field to Fork, I mentioned that PMA had undertaken a consumer research study (conducted by The Perishables Group) to examine shoppers’ preferences on fresh produce packaging and purchasing packaged fruits and vegetables. Last week, Steve Lutz and Cara Ammon from The Perishables Group stopped by the PMA office to give us an overview of what they found. I sat-in on their presentation, and here’s a sneak peek at some of the study’s findings:

• Half of the consumers surveyed said 15 percent or less of the produce they buy is packaged.
• Cleanliness and price are by far the most important factors in consumers’ decisions to buy packaged produce.
• The most important attribute of produce packaging is that it preserves freshness and taste. Following closely behind in importance are that packaging protect against damage and that the package store easily in their refrigerator.
• The most important attribute of the label is the size, indicating that consumers want to be able to inspect their produce before purchase, much as they would with bulk items.
• Price is the biggest deterrent to consumers when deciding between packaged and bulk produce.

This study will be available soon via the Consumer Research Center on the PMA website. Note: PMA members will need to be logged in to the site in order to access this report.

Also, if you have innovative packaging for your products – or if you’re a packaging provider – you might want to enter the 2011 PMA Impact Award: Excellence in Packaging contest. We’re looking for submissions that illustrate excellence in marketing, food safety, supply chain efficiency, sustainability, and consumer convenience.

The deadline to enter this contest is this Friday, August 26. Winners will be announced at Fresh Summit, October 14 to 17 in Atlanta, Georgia.

In June, members of PMA’s Government Affairs Committee (GAC) met in Washington, D.C., and told government officials why increasing produce consumption is important to them and their businesses. Here at Field to Fork, we want to highlight a few of those stories. This story comes from Michael Shapiro of Weis Buy Farms Inc.

Mike has two nephews, nine and six, and he’s getting them to try to new items he brings them. When he was watching the boys recently, he gave them a fresh fruit snack each day instead of their usual crackers. One of those snacks was orange watermelon.

“The day I cut into the watermelon they watched me,” Mike said. Both are eager eaters and willing to try anything. When they tasted the watermelon, they laughed. They loved it. For the next few days I packed it in their lunchbox. All their friends wanted to try it. I believe that if kids develop good eating habits, it stays with them.”

Mike is using his influence with his nephews, and they in turn are influencing their friends. It’s made me wonder whether I’m doing all I can in my sphere of influence – personally and professionally. How about you?

Beginning August 29, the Produce Traceability Initiative (PTI) will launch a six-week series of educational webinars designed to help all segments of the supply chain better understand traceability and the PTI’s goals. The schedule of webinars is:

• August 29: PTI’s 5 Ws (and 1 H) - Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. In this session, the PTI’s volunteer and staff leaders will address why traceability change is needed, how the PTI came about, what its implementation costs and benefits are, the standards and involved, and where to can find implementation help.
• September 7: Implementing PTI - Best Practices for Packer/Shippers. Learn best practices for implementing PTI from early adopters with hands-on experience in both field and facility packing.
• September 14: Implementing PTI - Best Practices for Assigning GTINs. In this session, learn how to approach GTIN assignment strategically, and best practices to use in assigning your GTINs.
• September 21: Implementing PTI - Best Practices for Case Labeling. Learn more about the global GS1 standards upon which PTI-compliant case labels are based, and the basics of case labeling from PTI early adopters.
• September 28: Implementing PTI - Best Practices for Hybrid Pallet Labeling. This session will cover best practices for creating and placing pallet labels, as well as preparing customers to receive them.
• October 6: Implementing PTI - Best Practices for Retailers. Learn best practices for implementing the PTI from sector early adopters.

Each webinar will be recorded and available for replay via the PTI website. To learn more about these sessions or to register, visit the PTI website.