From Field to Fork

Recently the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement released its annual report for 2008/09 and, during this time period, many more audits were conducted when compared to the previous year. This past year marked the first time an entire 12-month season of leafy greens production was audited by trained government inspectors. As a result, 641 total audits were conducted in 2008/09, compared to 424 during the last fiscal year (again due to it being a longer time period for audits to occur).

The report also highlighted the flexibility of the LGMA to adapt to changing food safety practices (e.g. ensuring that waste water from dairies or other animal operations does not come into contact with irrigation water used on leafy greens farms), as well as the agreement’s technology efforts in developing a database to capture all information collected during the LGMA’s audits of leafy greens fields (which makes it much easier for the California Department of Food and Agriculture to ensure it is auditing every handler-member of the LGMA at least four times per year and auditing every grower at least once).

Food safety efforts in fresh produce continue to attract attention, from FDA’s draft commodity specific food safety guidance for leafy greens, melons, and tomatoes, to food safety bills under consideration on Capitol Hill to a potential national leafy greens marketing agreement. It’s possible that the California report will receive media coverage in the coming days or weeks. If you receive questions about produce safety from your customers as a result of news reports, please let me know.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 at 11:00 am and is filed under Food Safety. 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.