The Food Safety Summit is well underway in Rosemont, Il! Take a look at the top 7 moments from the show so far! And be sure to follow along on Facebook at www.facebook.com/foodsafetysummit and on Twitter at twitter.com/FoodSafetySumit for all the latest show updates and news!
1. Amazon keynote!
Carletta Ooton, Amazon’s VP, health, safety, sustainability, security and compliance, gave the Wednesday morning keynote. She talked about how the company tracks food safety issues and how it reaches consumers when there's a recall. Check out the full story here!
2. 2018 NSF Food Safety Leadership award
Congratulations to Hal King, founder and CEO of Public Health Innovations LLC, on winning the 2018 NSF Food Safety Leadership award! Carey Allen, director of supply chain food safety certification for NSF International, presented him with the award this morning at the keynote!
3. DOJ and recalls
Shawn Stevens, Esq. Food Industry Counsel, talked about liabilities across the supply chain during today's Food Safety Summit
He says the DOJ doesn't have to prove intent. "[They] don’t have to prove that you knew you were shipping contaminated food products… The standard is you were aware of a condition that could lead to that, you were in a position to fix that, and you didn’t."
4. The Fipronil Egg issue
Oscar Garrison, with the United Egg Producers, talked about the Fipronil egg issue that happened in Europe during today's Food Safety Summit. He said a lot of farms were able to get rid of chemicals when they caged chickens, but now that more and more companies are committing to cage-free eggs that might change. "There’s a lot of commitments out there to go cage-free. When we put birds in enclosures we took away a lot of those things that were needed to manage chickens… and as we make that transition to cage-free, is this going to be something that we see in the U.S.?"
5. The CDC
Matthew Wise, of the CDC, started today's first session at the Food Safety Summit by talking about the papaya recalls in 2017 that made more than 200 people sick. He said it was difficult to figure out what to tell consumers, and that being specific wasn’t always helpful.
"Consumers are going to have a really hard time figuring out where their papayas are from. The stickers might fall off, the store may not know. So that’s a really hard message to act on,” he said.
He added that the situation was complicated by the fact that they had a hard time tracking where the issue originated from, saying "This is a big moving target. It's tough to do the right thing when the right thing is sort of moving around — when you’re finding out new information on Wednesday that you didn’t know on Tuesday. [But] this was a bad outbreak and we couldn’t sit and wait until the very end."
6. Communicating between departments
Dane Bernard, Bold Bear Food Safety (left), and John Zimmermann, First Watch Restaurants, spoke during the Food Safety Summit today about getting cooperation between departments.
Bernard talked about having a council of staff to help facilitate ideas.
"I wanted to get away from the temptation to sit in the corporate office and make edicts for the company, without input from the [staff]. So everything went through the council," Bernard says. "It helps to break down the silos and bring things forward. Some of the best ideas in the company came from people doing their jobs. Unless you have a way of capturing those and bringing those back to the table, you’re not [helping] the business.
[And] once you get those get those kind of relationships going, a lot of the communications happen organically."
7. Hand washing winner
Congratulations to Olivia Banks, USDA, for being the winner of the Hand washing for Life Olympics Day 1 Gold Medal!
