President Obama started off the New Year by signing off on a bill that overhauls the food safety system and provides some much-needed changes to laws that have been on the books since 1938. These changes are certainly in response to several serious outbreaks of E.coli and salmonella poisoning in eggs, peanuts and produce in the last few years.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 76 million Americans are sickened each year by foodborne illnesses, with 5,000 fatalities annually. This costs the U.S. economy $152 billion a year in health care and related expenses.
The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) allows the U.S. FDA to increase inspections at food companies and force recalls of contaminated foods from store shelves instead of waiting for businesses to do a voluntary recall. Larger farms and food manufacturers will be required to prepare detailed food safety plans and keep records to help the government trace recalled foods.
Recalls affect every product used by consumers. Whether food, medications, medical devices, or even automobiles, no company is safe from the drain of employee and financial resources necessitated in handling a recall, as well as the unfavorable effect on the brand and image involved in the recall.
However, by utilizing existing serialization technologies, recalls can be performed efficiently and accurately, allowing companies to maintain compliance with new laws as well as increase real-time visibility throughout the supply chain. And through the use of smart phones and other mobile technology (iPad, Galaxy and other tablets), a recall can be managed anywhere and at any time. Locating affected product can now be done in a fraction of the time with much less manual intervention than in the past, thus limiting brand erosion and negative press, achieving compliance with new laws, and limiting financial impact.
By John DiPalo, Chief Technical Officer at Acsis, Inc.
John DiPalo has more than 25 years of process and systems analysis and design experience. During that time John has implemented many manufacturing and warehousing systems across multiple ERP, midrange, and client server environments.
