From Field to Fork

If you missed the January 19 PMA Webinar on country of origin labeling compliance trends at retail, we have just posted the Webinar recording to the COOL page on the PMA Web site. During the session, USDA highlighted three commonly seen COOL challenges at store level:

• Store portioned/packaged items (e.g. cut melons and pineapple, bagged green beans, trayed tomatoes), packaged herbs, and specialty produce frequently do not have any origin declaration.
• Inaccurate origin declarations (e.g. where the sign does not match the country on the PLU sticker) are also common.
• Abbreviations and variant spellings do not unmistakably indicate the country of origin (e.g. the use of “locally grown” or region – instead of U.S. state or country of origin).

As noted during the Webinar, retail surveillance activities will be resuming soon and we’ve just learned that USDA is holding refresher training February 17 and 18 for state-level compliance personnel. So, expect to see an uptick in in-store compliance checks by the end of the month if not early March.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 10:30 am and is filed under Country of Origin Labeling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.