Wayne Labs has more than 20 years of editorial experience in industrial automation. He served as senior technical editor for I&CS/Control Solutions magazine for 18 years where he covered software, control system hardware and sensors/transmitters. Labs ran his own consulting business and contributed feature articles to Electronic Design, Control, Control Design, Industrial Networking and Food Engineering magazines. Before joining Food Engineering, he served as a senior technical editor for Omega Engineering Inc. Labs also worked in wireless systems and served as a field engineer for GE’s Mobile Communications Division and as a systems engineer for Bucks County Emergency Services. In addition to writing technical feature articles, Wayne covers FE’s Engineering R&D section.
Unless your facility is a USDA shop, then it most likely falls under FSMA regulations, which for the vast majority of processors is the law of the land. If you haven’t yet been visited by FDA for an audit, it is past time to get ready for that inevitable moment. I asked Ib Elandaloussi (CAL), Food and Consumer Products Group with Burns and McDonnell to talk briefly about designing facility solutions to meet FSMA rules.
According to a new NIST report, blockchain technology is being used to provide not only tamper-resistant transmission of manufacturing data for making machine parts, but also perfect traceability of that data to all participants in the production process.
While time is running out for small farms to comply with the FSMA Produce Rule, the FDA released a 172-page draft guidance for the Produce Safety Rule at the end of October, with a six month comment period.
Though Cyclospora outbreaks in the US happen less frequently than those caused by typical pathogens, the recent salad mix outbreaks occurring in July and August of this year have a familiar ring.
Severin Weiss, CEO of SpecPage and an expert in integrated software process solutions for recipe-based food and beverage processors, thinks PLM (product lifecycle management) and PDM (product data management) are two sets of tools that can help food processors avoid using fraudulent ingredients from less-than-scrupulous suppliers.
Maybe you still have a legacy control system in your facility, and it’s been running just fine, thank you. But one day in the future, it’ll give you a big surprise when the ancient motherboard dies, and you’re left without a system.
While the local foods movement has generated excitement among consumers, buying locally processed meats is not necessarily a guarantee that they will be more food safe than large-scale, commercially processed meats.
The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has notified FDA that Perry Johnson Registrars Food Safety Inc. (Troy, MI) has become the first certification body to be accredited under FDA’s Accredited Third-Party Certification Program for four program scopes. They include Produce Safety, Preventive Controls for Human Food, Juice HACCP and Seafood HACCP.
The USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service has proposed three sets of symbols to be used on labels of products compliant with the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard.