As we pass the three-year anniversary of the declaration of a public health emergency brought about by COVID-19, we can identify and incorporate lessons we’ve learned from the pandemic into food safety operations. With the pandemic now mostly in the rear-view mirror, food companies would be well advised to carefully evaluate the overall impact it has had on their operations and use that assessment to determine what changes or programs could be implemented now to protect the company and its brand in the event a similar crisis occurs in the future. As most readers know, the pandemic caused substantial disruptions within the food industry, including many that were significant for both the workforce and the overall global supply chain. Though many food companies had crisis management plans in place prior to the COVID-19 public health emergency, many of these plans did not anticipate or consider an emergency like the pandemic.

Moving forward, food companies should reevaluate their crisis management plans to account for—and incorporate—the important lessons learned from COVID-19.

Crisis Management Plan

Though FDA and USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) do not require food companies to have written crisis management programs, many companies have, nevertheless, developed such programs to help them navigate unexpected crisis situations. In addition, third-party audit standards such as SQF and BRC do, in fact, require a crisis management or business continuity program, further increasing the number of food companies that have developed and implemented such programs.

Typically, crisis management plans evaluate all known potential dangers that could impact the company’s ability to produce and deliver safe food, and then identify the methods and responsibilities for responding to the danger if it occurs. Dangers such as power outages, floods, severe weather events, and strikes are often considered in crisis management plans; however, a pandemic event may not have been considered in these programs prior to the COVID public health emergency.

Now that the food industry has experienced a pandemic and seen firsthand the disruptions one can cause, crisis management plans should be updated accordingly. Possible impacts to the company’s operations should be identified by evaluating the specific impact of COVID on operations, and control measures to reduce or eliminate future disruptions should be specified in the program. Control measures to address each possible impact should be specific, actionable, and based upon what the company learned about best practices and the feasibility of its own responses while managing COVID.

Companies that do not have crisis management plans should consider developing and implementing them. Like a recall plan, a crisis management plan allows a company and its leadership to consider how a potential event would impact the company and to determine how the company would respond if the event actually occurred. By engaging in this process long before an event occurs, the company will be better prepared to respond to ensure the event does not create a food safety concern.

Workforce and Training

Food safety regulations require that individuals engaged in food handling, processing, or packing be adequately trained, appropriate to their position, to ensure that food remains safe. In normal operations, food companies conduct initial onboarding training to first ensure new employees are adequately trained and then require regular refresher training.

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, introduced a number of new complexities for companies when considering food safety training. First, companies faced workforce shortages as outbreaks occurred and, in many cases, an increase in new employees or additional temporary employees. Programs and plans to conduct initial onboarding training for each new employee should account for differences in the quantity of new employees, possible lack of experience of new employees, potential turn-over of new employees, and the frequency of start dates.

In addition to changes in how often onboarding training will be required, social distancing recommendations may have also caused changes in how that training is provided. For example, companies that previously relied on classroom training faced difficulties in training the same number of employees within the same training space and within the same allocated times.

Moving forward, food companies should assess training programs and methods to confirm that the methods used to provide training allow for flexibility in case of crisis, but still guarantee that all food handlers are sufficiently and regularly training to ensure food safety. For example, in-person onboarding training can be recorded on video, and then shown to the new employees, to provide an alternative training method when necessary. Similarly, digital learning systems may provide a viable forward-looking solution for all training requirements.

Supply Chain Disruptions

As companies around the world faced pandemic-related challenges, significant supply chain disruptions were frequent. Many food companies were unable to obtain necessary raw materials and were forced to either slow or suspend operations or to identify alternative sources for those raw materials.

Food companies typically have thorough supplier approval programs in place to ensure that raw materials do not pose a food safety hazard. In addition, where a potential food safety hazard is controlled by the company’s supplier, FDA requires the company to develop and implement a supply chain program that evaluates the supplier to ensure that the hazard is adequately controlled.

When alternative sources (or alternative raw materials) become necessary to continue operations because of supply chain issues, these supplier approval and supply chain requirements must still be followed. When these programs do not allow for emergency approval under certain circumstances, additional delays in receiving raw materials could potentially occur due to the required review and assessment process. As a result, these programs can, and should, be designed to include specific approval criteria for a new supplier or a new raw material, as well as emergency approval procedures to allow for temporary approval of a new supplier or raw material when identified criteria are fulfilled. Under an emergency approval, companies can utilize an other­wise unapproved supplier or ingredient if the company conducts a food safety assessment sufficient to prevent any food safety risk to the consumer. Emergency approval is typically limited to a short period of time, to allow the company to conduct a full approval process while continuing operations.

Thus, as the current supply chain continues to return to normalcy, companies should, first, confirm that any suppliers or materials that were approved through emergency procedures and still in use have been fully vetted and approved. In turn, after completing that review, supply chain and supplier approval programs should be reassessed to incorporate lessons learned from the pandemic, such as changes to the emergency approval process or supplier audit requirements.

In addition, many companies require their suppliers to participate in an annual food safety audit. As companies limited access to their facilities, many of these audits were postponed or shifted to a virtual format. When a supplier approval or supply chain program requires an annual audit, updates should be made to specify the circumstances under which a postponement will be allowed or a virtual audit will be permitted. Alternatively, if a virtual or remote audit will not be permitted to fulfill this requirement, the company should carefully evaluate how these audits would occur if access to its suppliers’ production facilities is again limited in the future.

Although additional lessons from a company’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic can likely be identified, every food company can review and reassess its crisis management plan, training programs, and supply chain programs to incorporate broader industry-wide learnings. Though COVID caused substantial disruption to the food industry, lessons learned throughout the pandemic can be used to significantly strengthen and improve all existing food safety systems.

Stevens is a food industry lawyer and founder of Food Industry Counsel and a member of the Food Quality & Safety Editorial Advisory Panel. Reach him at stevens@foodindustrycounsel.com. Presnell, a food industry consultant and lawyer who is also with Food Industry Counsel, has worked in the food industry for nearly a decade. Reach her at presnell@foodindustrycounsel.com.

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With the end of 2022 upon us, data from the CDC showed that COVID-19 cases in the United States had been on the decline in recent months; however, cases are beginning to tick up over the past few weeks, which raises a question about the status of the pandemic: Is the pandemic (really) over?

Admittedly, many people in the U.S. have already returned to normal in their personal lives; few masks are seen in public these days and restaurant dining rooms are open. Supply chain concerns and personnel policy adjustments are still at the forefront of COVID-19 mitigation policies, but where does the food industry stand if another surge occurs? Are we better prepared than we were in March 2020? Are there new regulations or guidance to support risk mitigation? Will there be enforcement criteria going forward?

Nearly three years in, let’s look back at the food sector’s overall response and take a speculative peek into the future.

Current Data

Before evaluating the food sectors’ efforts to protect both employee and food safety, let’s see where we stand. According to CDC’s data tracker, 2022 started with the highest number of COVID-19 cases ever recorded in the pandemic in the U.S., reaching more than 5,000,000 cases per week. As of November 28, 2022, the weekly case count sits at just upward of 305,000, up slightly from an October 2022 low mark of 265,000, a number that hasn’t been seen since June 2020.

But, before the celebrations begin, it’s important to note the slight uptick in cases recently amid reports of new variants that appear to have increased vaccine immunity evasiveness. It should also be noted that a similar low point occurred in June 2021, when U.S. case counts dropped to as low as 82,000 per week, only to spike to more than a million per week by August 2021.

In the spring of 2020, COVID-19 hit the meat and poultry industry hard. Workers in close proximity to each other in poorly ventilated chilly rooms offered the perfect conditions in which the virus could thrive and spread. With absenteeism high, some companies actually incentivized workers with cash bonuses to continue working even if they were ill, a practice that was eventually stopped to prevent further spread of the disease. There were clear indications that these conditions contributed to community spread events in situations where workers often shared transportation and even lived together. According to CDC’s newsletter Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, among 23 states reporting COVID-19 outbreaks in meat and poultry processing facilities, 16,233 cases in 239 facilities occurred, including 86 (0.5%) COVID-19–related deaths.

Guidance for Industry

The World Health Organization (WHO) published an early guidance document that offered initial steps the food industry should take as the pandemic exploded. This was a general document that was not country specific, but at least offered industry a starting point.

This was quickly followed by a guidance issued by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on March 19, 2020, entitled “Guidance on the Essential Critical Infrastructure Workforce: Ensuring Community and National Resilience in COVID-19,” in which workers in the food and agriculture sector—agricultural production, food processing, distribution, retail and food service, and allied industries—were named as essential critical infrastructure workers (see “CISA Worker Risk Assessments,” below).

The agency’s National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP) risk management framework, which has been in place since 2014, identifies 16 industry sectors as essential, including the food and agriculture sector, which is composed of an estimated 2.1 million farms, 935,000 restaurants, and more than 200,000 registered food manufacturing, processing, and storage facilities, accounting for roughly one-fifth of the nation’s economic activity. There are four other sectors applicable for food: water and wastewater, energy, transportation, and chemicals (pesticides). NIPP outlines the mitigation options for each sector using a matrix.

OSHA Steps In

In food facilities, COVID-19 response preparation was often assigned to food safety teams, staff who had a keen understanding of risk management but little or no public health knowledge. Although guidance was finally available, many scrambled to find accurate information for protocol development in the heat of an outbreak. This resulted in information and awareness gaps and poorly designed procedures such as the early attendance incentives, and it left workers to manage active disease cases identified during the workday.

Commonly implemented interventions included employee temperature screening at points of entry, control measures (universal face coverings), engineering controls (physical barriers), and infection prevention measures (additional hand hygiene stations). Adequate social distancing proved to be a real challenge for food producers, resulting in continued high case counts in some facilities.

In May 2020, OSHA released a COVID-19 planning guidance document based on traditional infection prevention and industrial hygiene practices. They encouraged plan managers to stay abreast of guidance from federal, state, local, tribal, and/or territorial health agencies, and to consider how to incorporate those recommendations and resources into workplace-specific response plans.

These plans should consider and address the level(s) of risk associated with various worksites and job tasks workers perform at those sites. OSHA divided job tasks into four risk exposure levels: very high, high, medium, and lower risk. The agency’s Occupational Risk Pyramid shows the four exposure risk levels to represent probable distribution of risk, with “very high” and “high” at the top of the pyramid, including workers primarily found in the healthcare field and those who come into direct contact with infected patients. Most U.S. food workers likely fall in the “medium” exposure risk level due to the high population density found in food facilities.

The publication of the OSHA guidance completed the fundamental information necessary to develop a comprehensive plan for preparation and response to a pandemic; however, it should be noted that these are guidance documents and therefore do not represent required actions under law. In the chaos of the early days of the pandemic, many didn’t know where to access CISA or OSHA documents, so there may still be implementation gaps that should be addressed. Enforcement activities remain unlikely unless actual regulations are proposed.

What Will Winter 2023 Bring?

Evidence is emerging that the Northern Hemisphere is on course for a surge of cases this winter; the question is, how large will it be? Scientists believe new immune-evading strains of the Omicron variant, behavior changes, and waning immunity could result in more COVID-19 infections.

With newer and more contagious variants of the disease emerging, a new phase of the pandemic response is likely at hand. Although largely unchanged from the August 2020 version 4.0 release, the 4.1 version of the CISA guidance encourages industry to use its recommendations to update or develop a response plan to further reduce the frequency and severity of the virus’s impact in the event of another surge in cases.

Currently, more than 400,000 cases are reported globally every day, or roughly 2.8 million per week. This is not an insignificant number. Nine of 12 countries with the highest per capita case counts are in Europe, and the U.S. often follows, after a brief lag. These cases aren’t equally distributed, so a review of certain countries or regions provides the most accurate data to try to predict future spikes, although it still amounts to looking into a muddy crystal ball.

European Union data is the most worrisome at present. Increasing cases, along with shifting dominance in variants and subvariants, could be a prediction for the U.S. Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, director of the Center for Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, was appointed to (then) President-elect Biden’s 13-member Transition COVID-19 advisory board. He reports an increase from 1.1 million cases per week in early September 2022 to 1.9 million cases per week in the four-week period from September through October 11, 2022, in the EU, as reported by WHO. The WHO/EU consists of 53 countries, 37 of which reported increasing cases; 14 reported rates increasing at greater than 20% over the prior two weeks.

According to data for this period, reviewed by Dr. Osterholm, Germany reported fewer than 30,000 cases per day, a number that increased to 105,000 cases per day, and was at or near hospital capacity, during this four-week period in the fall of 2022. France reported increases from 17,000 to 56,000 per day over the same period, and both countries reported that 80% to 90% of cases were attributed to the BA.5 variant. Austria reported 4,000 per day, increasing to 14,000 cases per day, with hospitalizations increasing from 1,100 to 2,400 during the same period. Italy’s cases doubled, from 20,000 to 40,000.

While most countries have shifted to a more sustainable mode of pandemic response measures, China continues to utilize a strict zero COVID-19 policy, including the use of complete lockdowns. This policy resulted in a two-month lockdown of Shanghai earlier this year and a more recent shutdown in Guangzhou that impacted 19 million people. Several protests began in late November, as people across China have grown weary of these severe measures.

Yum China, the Shanghai-based company that owns the KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell chains in China, re­ports the challenges resulting from the continued shutdowns. “In October, approximately 1,400 of our stores were either temporarily closed or offered only takeaway and delivery services,” the company said on November 1, 2022.

On the other end of the spectrum, Taiwan recorded relatively few COVID-19 cases until the highly infectious Omicron variant and its sub-variants began spreading in January 2022. Despite reporting more than 6.5 million infections since then, more than 99.5% of cases have been mild or asymptomatic, according to Taiwan’s health authorities. This may be due to the high level of vaccination uptake; four out of five people in the country have received the vaccine and at least one booster. Quarantine requirements have been lifted for inbound travelers, and pre-entry testing is no longer needed. Japan and Hong Kong have also relaxed COVID-19 border restrictions to boost struggling tourism.

In mid-August 2022, an effort called the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub laid out several scenarios for the U.S. over the upcoming months. After surges caused by the BA.5 Omicron variant, resulting in high levels of immunity in the population, the models suggest that the U.S. could be in for a relatively quiet season at the end of 2022, as long as vaccine booster campaigns are robust and new variants don’t emerge.

Even with a new variant, a big surge in U.S. cases isn’t certain. More than a month into fall, hospitalizations were declining slightly, in line with projections, says Justin Lessler, PhD, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who leads the modeling effort. But other factors on the horizon could spell trouble. As of November 28, U.S. cases and hospitalizations are ticking up in key areas.

Parts of North America are also seeing the rise of other Omicron sublineages. One such variant, BA.2.12.1, also has the capacity to evade antibodies triggered by a previous Omicron infection and vaccination, according to a study by virologist David Ho, MD, at Columbia University in New York City. The emergence of these strains suggests that the Omicron lineage is continuing to make gains by eroding immunity, says Dr. Ho. “It’s pretty clear that there are a few holes in Omicron that are gradually being filled up by these new subvariants.”

If SARS-CoV-2 continues along this path, its evolution could come to resemble that of other respiratory infections, such as influenza. In this scenario, immune-evading mutations in circulating variants, such as Omicron, could combine with dips in population-wide immunity to become the key drivers of periodic waves of infection.

Scientists say we could see more surprises from SARS-CoV-2. For instance, the Delta variant hasn’t completely vanished and, as global immunity to Omicron and its expanding family increases, a Delta descendant could mount a comeback. Whatever their source, new variants seem to emerge roughly every six months, and scientists wonder whether this is the structure that future COVID-19 outbreaks will settle into.

While we can’t predict the future with something as unpredictable as COVID-19, the virus is clearly not over yet. But we now have the experience and tools to develop response plans that can reduce or prevent large-scale outbreaks within food facilities. These plans will require maintenance and continued vigilance until the day comes that we can declare the pandemic finished—until the next one pops up.

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During 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, American consumers retained their pre-pandemic eating occasions at approximately the same frequency: early morning snack, breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, dinner, after-dinner snack, and late-night meal/snack, according to 2022 research from The Hartman Group. Because most countries isolated from each other and residents were primarily mandated to follow isolation and quarantining practices, those venues with high close-contact activities remained closed or went out of business through most of 2020. Direct person-to-person contacts were severely minimized, almost eliminated. As eat-at-home occasions surged during the pandemic, the number of consumers eating anywhere away from home decreased by about 50% from before the pandemic.

Further, because consumers mostly worked from home, they ate more with others (i.e., family, significant others) during those eating occasions when they would have eaten alone (i.e., for early morning snack, breakfast, morning snack, and lunch) prior to 2020. Consumers also learned to shop more efficiently, especially for dinners, snacks, and meals that they had purchased from food service pre-pandemic. Online shopping and delivery significantly grew in 2020 among all generations except for Gen Z who had often already used digital shopping. But the habit of same-day sourcing stayed. Because of shelter-at-home mandates, about 40% of U.S. consumers cooked at home more often than before the pandemic. They also focused on more expensive foods and ingredients with health and wellness qualities. The trade-up was justified by reduced spending on food and beverages outside the home, fewer options in recreational activities, and travel restrictions. Consumers also had more disposable income, and about 45% also declared that they would continue cooking at home after the pandemic.

But the cooking fun fizzled out quickly in the second half of 2020 as cooking fatigue set in. Consumers shifted their attention to new cooking methods, culinary skills, and authentic exotic flavors. They ate certain foods on other occasions not traditionally meant for those foods, similar to a “breakfast all day” situation.

Where Are We Now?

Consumer behavior toward COVID-19 around the world seemed to occur in common stages. In the beginning, consumers tried to strengthen their health and immunity through products. They then prepared for periods of quarantining, including hoarding supplies to help them manage those restrictions and any others that might be instituted.

More than two years after the pandemic started, about 48% of consumers remained extremely or very concerned about COVID-19 virus variants, declining from 52% in October 2021, according to research on grocery trends by FMI. By this time, however, other important sources of concern began to surface, such as food prices that were up 4% from early 2021 and supply chain issues that have not adequately addressed out-of-stock items. The consumer price index for all items rose to 8.5% for the year ending March 2022, with the food index rising to 8.8%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The number of employees (45%) who continued to work from home full- or part-time remained high, resulting in higher than pre-pandemic levels for at-home eating of mid-morning snack, lunch, and afternoon snack. But the food-at-home index rose 10% for the year ending March 2022, levying economic pressure on work-at-home employees.

In 2019, before the pandemic, eating away from home was highest among Millennials (34%), followed by Gen Z (27%), Gen X (26%), and Boomers (14%). During the first year of the pandemic in 2020, all generations showed a decline in their away-from-home eating occasions. But in late 2021, all generations showed a resurgence, almost to pre-pandemic levels, in away-from-home eating. Gen Z didn’t show much change in their away-from-home eating habits during the pandemic, likely because they are the first generation to grow up in a totally digital world and, for them, shopping and ordering online is a normal process.

Before the pandemic, consumers also were more likely to eat alone (48%) during early morning snack, breakfast, morning snack, and lunch times as they hurriedly prepared to go to work or were already at work. But in late 2021, all generations experienced a decrease in time eating alone except for the Boomers, whose eating-alone experiences remained unchanged at 52%. The Millennials and Gen Z experienced significant drops in time eating alone from pre-pandemic and pandemic levels, and Gen X during pandemic times, perhaps due to a rise in eating as a couple and as a family. Many in these generations also moved back in with family due to financial hardships, causing a decline in time eating alone.

Restaurant Dining

In 2021, approximately 24% of eating occasions took place in or were ordered from a restaurant (including takeout and delivery), surpassing even the 2019 levels. Millennials, Gen X, and parents significantly looked to restaurants to address their need for convenient and healthful meals, often enjoying those meals with others. It was also their way of demonstrating their support for restaurants that were struggling to remain open. In addition, although cooking fatigue quickly set in toward the latter part of 2020, consumers, when they chose to cook, seemed to use higher levels of preparation in 2021 than in 2019. On the other hand, consumption of ready-to-eat foods remained relatively stable during these times, while consumers engaging in little or moderate preparation of food (e.g., stove-top cooking or microwaving) declined. But the food-away-from-home index rose 6.9% over the year ending March 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, causing a concern that eating away-from-home eating rates might stall or even decline.

When consumers sourced their food partially or totally from restaurants, it seemed that they intentionally planned to have leftovers. In 2021, about 66% of eating occasions involved all or some leftovers sourced from a restaurant, a number significantly higher than those in 2019 and 2020. For all generations except the Boomers, the number of eating occasions that involved leftovers significantly increased from 2019. From 2019 to 2021, there was a significant decline, from 51% to 34%, in the total number of leftover occasions that did not involve food sourced from a restaurant. It could be that, for consumers, having leftover food sourced from a restaurant (takeout or delivery) has developed into a norm. Besides, consumption of leftovers was a way for them to save and to reduce food waste.

Spending

Due to limited spending opportunities during the pandemic, Millennials, parents, and higher-income households were willing to pay more for food and beverages with higher quality products, more unique flavor, higher integrity in sourcing and processing, and other authentic characteristics that elevated their eating experiences. During those times, many declared that “money is no object” when choosing healthful foods to sustain them during the pandemic.

By mid-2021, food spending was almost equally split between retail and food service, just as it was pre-pandemic. Consumers increased food and beverage consumption more for late night meals/snacks and early morning snacks, perhaps due to their resumption of evening social activities. Although consumers reduced their participation in the other eating occasions, there was a significant increase in the average number of categories of food and beverages consumed in late 2021 as compared with 2019. At-home eating significantly declined and eating at work and at restaurants significantly increased, although not to pre-pandemic levels.

After two years of drastically altering their daily lives to survive the pandemic, consumers began to show signs of an eager return to pre-pandemic living conditions in 2022. But the consumer price indices of all items, especially at-home and away-from-home foods started to increase in 2020. To transition back sensibly to the lives they had led before the pandemic, approximately 86% of consumers began to change the behaviors they had developed during the pandemic, according to the FMI survey. They searched for grocery deals (59%), bought store brands (35%), substituted or changed their products of choice (58%), and changed where and how they bought groceries (48%).

According to the Expert Panel of the Forbes Business Council, consumers today are or will be better informed and more participatory, make purchase decisions “on-the-go,” use text messages via social media, demand consistent quality and volume of products, and prefer businesses that address ESG mandates (environmental, social and governance practices). They will also require businesses to be more customer-centric providing personalized and high-quality customer service. These characteristics will allow them to wade comfortably through the pandemic.

Food Habits in Other Countries

There do not seem to be studies on the eating behavior of consumers in other countries that report the same categories as those included by The Hartman Group and FMI, but there is a systematic review of longitudinal studies conducted by Gonzalez-Monroy and colleagues and published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health to compare eating behavior changes pre- and post-pandemic. Of the 826 studies these researchers initially gathered, 23 longitudinal studies passed their planned screening process. There were five studies from Italy, four from China, two each from Australia, Spain, United Kingdom, and Japan, and one each from the United States, India, Brazil, France, Poland, and Canada. Only adults older than 18 with no comorbidities were chosen, but they found specific subgroups of people with diabetes mellitus, young obese people, and others in vulnerable situations. The group was relatively young, with a mean age of 24.2 years.

The researchers confirmed the existence of changes in eating behavior during the pandemic. Because people stayed mostly at home during these times, the researchers reported that consumers cooked more and “showed a more frequent intake of food, an increased consumption of ultra-processed food and a higher caloric intake due to a more frequent alcohol consumption.” People in the specific subgroups also “appeared to increase the daily amount of food eaten” with a reported “significant increase in the amount and frequency of unhealthy food products.” Younger people showed “a lower adherence to healthy diets such as the Mediterranean Diet” “due to an increased intake of food, a preference for snacks and a lack of fruit and vegetables intake.” The researchers concluded that their systematic review showed “changes in eating behavior, which may have become less healthy during the pandemic.” They advocated the use of government-supported preventive interventions and social actions to promote healthy eating habits with a focus not only on food intake but also on alcohol consumption.

Will There Be More Changes in Food Habits?

Consumers worldwide changed their eating behavior during the pandemic. Some changed to strengthen themselves to ward off the coronavirus by eating what they considered healthful foods. Others changed the frequency of eating at different eating occasions. And others, probably due to anxiety and uncertainty, changed by overeating and increasing their alcohol consumption. Will these changes significantly and permanently alter our daily lifestyles? And, how will consumers consequently react?

Dr. Saulo is principal/owner of Food Science Interests, LLC, and is based in Hawaii. Reach her at aurora@hawaii.edu.

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Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, more than 400 meatpacking workers have died of the virus, and approximately 86,000 fell ill with it, with many of the most serious cases occurring early in the pandemic, before vaccines were developed and advanced safety protections enacted. In April 2020, President Trump signed an executive order to keep meatpacking plants open, classifying workers at these plants as essential and requiring them to report to work. Now, a congressional report released by staff of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, alleges that two of the world’s biggest meat manufactures—Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods—served as instigators behind the president’s executive order.

The report cites emails between Tyson Foods CEO Noel White and Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan that allegedly show a conversation between the two executives pondering how to keep the plants open. In one, White allegedly asks if his business colleague would like to “discuss the possibility of getting President Donald Trump to sign an executive order to keep meatpacking plants open.”

The House report says that this correspondence led to a “high-pressure” lobbying campaign by the meat industry, which ultimately led to what it describes as “a presidential order that effectively thwarted efforts by local health officials to shut plants down and slow the spread of COVID-19.”

Furthermore, the report alleges that Tyson lawyers, in coordination with Smithfield Foods, drafted an early version of the executive order, providing the specific language that would eventually make its way into Trump’s unprecedented order. The report also alleges that, during a call with USDA Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue in early April 2020, meatpacking CEOs stressed that workers should not be entitled to unemployment benefits if they are otherwise able to work through the pandemic and cautioned against “creating an incentive, much less a path, for food industry workers to choose unemployment over producing food.”

Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the subcommittee chairman, said in a prepared statement, “The shameful conduct of corporate executives pursuing profit at any cost during a crisis and government officials eager to do their bidding regardless of resulting harm to the public must never be repeated.”

The information in the report was collected from more than 151,000 pages of documents provided by meatpacking companies and interest groups, plus interviews with meatpacking workers, union representatives, former federal officials, and state and local health authorities.

Requests for comment from the two meat manufacturers were not immediately returned; however, both companies have released statements defending their safety efforts during the pandemic, though not mentioning any aspect of the report.

Jim Monroe, a spokesperson for Smithfield Foods, noted the COVID-19 pandemic presented a “first-of-its-kind challenge,” and added that the company has invested more than $900 million in worker safety.

Gary Mickelson, Tyson’s director of public relations, released a statement praising the company’s work with government officials since the pandemic began. “This collaboration is crucial to ensuring the essential work of the U.S. food supply chain and our continued efforts to keep team members safe,” he said. “For example, last year Tyson Foods was supported by the Biden Administration as we became one of the first fully vaccinated workforces in the U.S. Our efforts have also included working cooperatively and frequently with local health department officials in our plant communities.”

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As the Omicron variant fades, many anticipate at least a respite from a virus that has shattered systems and societies, even while another variant, BA.2, gains ground. Both the respite from one variant of COVID-19 and the increasing spread of another underscore the uncertainties remaining about the full impact of this virus.

How has the food industry adapted? What have the past two years shown about the vulnerabilities and strengths of the food industry, and what lessons have been learned that can carry the industry forward through inevitable future major disruptions?

“COVID-19 was a real wake-up call to highlight vulnerabilities in our food supply chain,” says Jeffrey LeJeune, PhD, food safety officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. The organization has provided many guidance and policy briefs on COVID-19 and the food supply, and continues to monitor, update, and advise the industry.

As an internationally recognized expert in food safety and diseases transmitted between animals and people, Dr. LeJeune emphasizes that the challenges to the food industry brought on by the pandemic are not related to the biology of the virus itself, in the critical sense that the virus causing COVID-19 is not transmitted by foods or food packaging.

What did stress the food industry during the first wave of the virus was the need to rapidly adapt systems from farm to table to safeguard against a new infectious virus with deadly potential. Among the changes was the need to quickly develop and implement strategies around supply chain issues to accommodate changing consumer demands. Food packaged and labeled for restaurants, for example, had to be repackaged and labeled for sale at grocery stores. Worker safety issues and facility safety protocols moved to the forefront as meat and other food processing facilities had to quickly impose measures to protect workers and facilities from the rapidly and highly contagious virus. Worker shortages, brought on by worker absenteeism due to illness or by the millions of people who have left the workforce, continue to strain the industry.

Major disruptions to the supply chain continue to cause major fallout. Aljoša Trmčič, PhD, dairy extension associate at Cornell University in New York, NY, and part of the Food Industry COVID-19 Emergency Task Force that assisted local, national, and international food industries with issues related to the pandemic, says that supply chain disruptions hit every sector of the food industry and resulted in difficulty getting sufficient amounts of raw materials and supplies (such as packaging and cleaning chemicals), maintaining a sufficient workforce to make and distribute products, and—particularly challenging—protecting workers from the virus.

Now, going into the beginning of the third year of the pandemic, the food industry continues to grapple with its effects. Response by the food industry to these effects has helped the industry adapt and move forward with potentially increased resilience to meet future major disruptions. What issues still face the food industry? How can the sector be ready for any large-scale obstacles that come down the pipeline?

Supply Chain Disruptions to the Food Industry

Shawn K. Stevens, a food industry attorney in Milwaukee and a member of the Food Quality & Safety Editorial Advisory Board, underscores the supply chain issues still facing most companies —from difficulty obtaining certain ingredients to the challenge of retaining sufficient employees to manage the work. “Everyone is feeling pressure,” he says.

Recent evidence from Minnesota attests to these ongoing issues. General Mills, as reported recently in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, is seeing major disruptions in ingredients getting into their plants and is having difficulty, for example, keeping up with consumer demand for various products (e.g., ready-to-bake items, hot snacks, and pizza). The hospitality industry in Minnesota cites higher costs and supply chain challenges; a major issue is that the industry has 32,000 fewer workers compared with pre-pandemic levels.

Along with the challenges involved in finding sufficient ingredients, supplies, and workers, another ongoing negative effect of the pandemic on industry, Stevens says, is the increased lack of safety when it comes to certain commodities. Cashew pieces or splits, for instance, are in short supply, so consumers are obtaining them through unregulated cottage industry vendors.

On the positive side, Stevens cites a heightened awareness in the industry, from manufacturing facilities to restaurants, of the need for good personnel hygiene within facilities to protect workers against the COVID virus.

Dr. Trmčič too sees a shift from focusing on food safety and quality to protecting employees inside and outside of the work environment. Noting that good manufacturing practices (GMPs) have always played an important role in the food industry to protect consumers and, indirectly, business, Dr. Trmčič says that parts of GMPs put in place as COVID-19 control strategies now directly protect employee and business health, in addition to protecting consumers from foodborne illness. “As much as GMPs were always followed, this shift meant that even more energy was put into it,” he says, citing, for example, employers encouraging employees to stay home if not feeling well, even offering paid sick leave. “Today, we have data to show that some foodborne infections were reduced during the pandemic, which can in part be attributed to enhanced control strategies implemented by the food industry,” he adds.

Stevens notes, however, that the drop in recalls during the past two years (from 800 in 2017 and 2018 to 400 in 2020) are one factor likely affecting the reduction in foodborne infections. Although the stricter worker safety protections in place due to COVID-19 could be a factor in the reduction of foodborne infections over the past two years, he also says this could be due, in part, to the lack of federal oversight given the distractions of COVID-19. “The FDA has been in hibernation mode for the past two years, and have not been visiting food facilities,” he adds.

Stevens thinks that food manufacturing and processing facilities are in for a “rude awakening” as FDA begins aggressively inspecting facilities again. He suspects companies will receive a lot of 483s and warning letters because of what he sees as a bit of sloppiness within the industry, given the extra demands they have had to meet in order to maintain their day-to-day foundational food safety programs during the pandemic. Worker protections are typically under OSHA jurisdiction, not FDA, so it remains to be seen how oversight and enforcement activities in this area will be handled.

Food Safety Culture

Over the past decade, many have argued for the adoption of a culture of food safety within food industries, to promote a mindset of attitudes and behavior shared among management and employees toward ensuring food safety. For Dr. Trmčič, COVID-19 occasioned the opportunity for manufacturing facilities and other food industry sectors to move closer to adopting such a culture.

As described in a 2021 review of food safety and employment health implications of COVID-19, Dr. Trmčič uses the phrase “COVID-19 control culture” to capture the response by the food industry, which has adapted rapidly to the need to protect workers and operations.

“This culture captures the mentality of every single employee that is focused on the common goal of preventing the introduction and spread of COVID-19 in the food operation and maintaining the health of all employees and functionality of the entire food operation,” he says, adding that each operation within the food industry managed to build a COVID-19 control culture through its successful fight with the pandemic.

Going forward, Dr. Trmčič encourages the food industry to sustain the same mentality it had tackling COVID-19, converting it to a food safety culture where all employees are focused on the common goal of preventing foodborne illnesses. “The main positive impact [of the pandemic], I think, is that the food industry was forced to build this COVID-19 control culture, and now they can use this to shift to a food safety culture,” he says.

Table 1 lists several potential long-term changes in industry caused by the pandemic, as well as their impacts on food safety and quality and the issues industry can consider as they prepare their operations for future large-scale disruptions.

Ready Roadmap for the Food Industry

If nothing else, the pandemic demonstrated the critical need for the food industry to be ready and able to adapt to the inevitable occurrence of future large-scale disruptions. Wheat shortages from the war in Ukraine are already looming, and more frequent severe climate events will continue to stress the food supply chain.

The key to being ready, says Dr. Trmčič, is to have a roadmap for the first days, weeks, and months of the disruption. As part of the Food Industry COVID-19 Emergency Task Force, he and his colleagues are encouraging food operations to create a type of toolbox of everything they did during the pandemic to manage the different parts of the supply chain and then use this to adapt to a future disruption.

For example, he says, a cheese producer that primarily provides products to restaurants could be ready to switch to smaller consumer packaging and start offering product to retailers.

To build a roadmap, Dr. Trmčič suggests that companies document the effects of the pandemic on their business over the past two years, detail the unexpected events that occurred along with their responses—what worked, what didn’t work—and describe how the parts that did not work could be fixed. Calling this plan A, he says that at the end of this process a company should be ready for a disruption.

He also recommends developing alternative plans for other types of interruptions, such as a chemical company not sending cleaning supplies, a drastic reduction in the workforce, the loss of a major customer, the unavailability of a key ingredient, and so on. He encourages industry to diversify and broaden their business connections with, for example, more than one supplier for each key ingredient, and to find more than one way for a product to be used, packaged, distributed, and marketed. “I would include in the plan some type of cost–benefit analysis so you know for each plan how much you can invest based on how much you expect to gain,” he adds.

Ellen Shumaker, PhD, director of outreach for Safe Plates program at North Carolina State University, underscores the idea that those in the food industry who used what they learned during the pandemic to put guidelines in place will be better positioned going forward to deal with another disruption, but will be limited in their preparedness depending on the vagaries of the next potential pathogen. “Those who are taking that proactive step are going to be much better positioned in the event of another pandemic, but there is a limit to how prepared the industry can be ultimately,” she says, citing unknowns about the type of pathogen, how easily it spreads, and whether it is foodborne.

Staying Nimble

Underlying these efforts is the need for the food industry to adapt. “Every time we’re faced with a massive disruption, we learn a lot,” says Stevens. “We learn to become nimble, flexible, and creative in the new ways of doing business that will stay with us a very long time.”

Dr. LeJeune also uses the word “nimble” to characterize what the food industry needs to ensure that they can adapt to disruptions going forward. “The lessons learned remind us that we need to be more nimble and work proactively to prevent, detect, and have rapid holistic (One Health) responses to provide solutions to problems as they emerge,” he says.

He lauds the food industry for adapting to new scientific information as it became available and keeping the supply chains open. “This experience, I believe, has strengthened food systems and made us better prepared for the next pandemic.”

Dr. Trmčič, food workers in particular should be given credit for their role during the pandemic. “In my eyes, food workers are the champions of this pandemic, immediately after all the doctors and nurses who worked days and nights to help COVID-19 patients,” he says.

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Over my two-decade career as a food microbiologist, I have seen a dramatic shift in the methods used in the detection of foodborne pathogens—from conventional microbiology techniques to molecular methods. Developments in these molecular technologies have led to wider access and shorter testing times that have allowed public health agencies and food manufacturers to ensure a safer food supply.

Having started my career at FDA, I have seen firsthand the significance of rapid methods in minimizing the scale and impact of foodborne outbreaks. Access to in-house molecular testing has helped manufacturers to monitor the bacterial load in their facilities and allowed them to perform environmental mapping to identify areas to focus sanitation efforts. As part of a quality assurance program, increased testing for microorganisms has helped companies spot trends and intervene before issues grow out of control. The passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), which declared that environmental monitoring and finished product testing are a part of a robust food safety system, is an open endorsement and recognition of the benefits of testing by public health agencies.

With the recognition of the importance of pathogen detection, molecular methods have continued to be developed to improve testing. Initially, immunological and nucleic acid amplification testing methods were developed for more rapid, sensitive, and specific results, but these methods were mostly used for screening for the presence or absence of pathogens. Additional tests were needed to confirm the presence of potential pathogens and to more deeply characterize the microorganisms.

Technologies such as pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), multi-locus variable-number tandem repeat analysis (MLVA), multi-locus sequence typing (MLST), and whole genome sequencing (WGS) provide higher resolution in distinguishing strains of bacteria to match food, clinical, and environmental isolates in outbreak investigations, to track pathogens within a facility, and to identify sources of contamination. Taken together, there are many techniques that have been useful in ensuring food safety, but biotech companies that develop tests still strive for the holy grail: a rapid, low-cost, sensitive, and specific method for detection with strain level resolution that is easy to use and does not require extensive expertise and training in performing the test or analyzing data.

Next Generation Sequencing

One promising candidate to achieve these goals is next generation sequencing (NGS). With the establishment of GenomeTrakr in 2014 and Pulsenet’s adoption of WGS in 2016, genomic data has been widely adopted as a common language across a network of government, academic, and private industry laboratories. The availability and accessibility of high-quality, genome-wide data makes NGS incredibly powerful in strain level resolution of microorganisms for many users. An additional advantage of NGS is the generation of millions of sequencing reads to provide redundancy in detection of multiple targets to increase accuracy and minimize false positive and false negative results.

While NGS can provide these benefits, sequencing workflows can be complex and laborious, requiring many hands-on steps in sample preparation, amplification, library preparation, and loading sequencing flow cells. These workflows are not easily performed by novices, requiring expertise and training in both performing assays and interpreting data. Many experts had been skeptical that NGS could ever be used for routine detection and characterization of pathogens in foods because of these challenges. These predictions may have proven true if not for the application of automated robotic systems and data analysis pipelines to simplify NGS. Minimally trained technicians can load an automated NGS platform, walk away, and view curated results after the analyses are done. Analytical software can interpret NGS data to simply provide answers to the questions asked, without requiring the user to have a deep understanding of bioinformatics and genome assemblies.

Fully automated sequencing platforms are now in heavy use and battle-tested in the food industry. Automated NGS assays have been approved by the Association of Analytical Chemists (AOAC) and USDA’s National Poultry Improvement Plan (NPIP). In addition, the technology is becoming prevalent in the poultry industry, providing detection, speciation, serotyping, and similarity analyses for environmental, in process, and finished goods testing. These automated NGS systems provide high-throughput NGS testing to accommodate hundreds of samples, improve robustness by reducing user errors, increase consistency, and free up the technician’s time for other duties.

Similarities Food Testing and COVID-19 Testing

The global COVID-19 pandemic has faced many of the same issues that the food industry faces when dealing with pathogen testing. Assays for detecting SARS-CoV-2 needed to be rapid, sensitive, and accurate, similar to food pathogen detection assays. Time to results, important for foods with limited shelf lives where results are needed before releasing goods to markets, were now important for SARS-CoV-2 testing to prevent release of infectious individuals to mix with the susceptible populations. Highly sensitive assays with ultra-low limits of detection, important for food testing where illness can occur when even a single cell is ingested and multiplies, was now important for SARS-CoV-2 testing where individuals in early or late stages of infection could have low viral loads but could still infect others.

Accuracy is of paramount importance, as false positive and false negative results can be disastrous. In food testing, false positive results may cause economic loss when uncontaminated foods are recalled, and false negative results may allow unsafe foods to reach the public. Similarly, for SARS-Cov2 testing, false positive results may lead to uninfected individuals being mistakenly quarantined with infected patients, and false negative results may increase the chances of SARS-Cov2 carriers infecting others.

Just as NGS provided solutions to critical challenges in food pathogen testing, it has also been contributing to unmet needs in SARS-Cov-2 testing. The world recognized the need to better track and trace SARS-CoV-2 through the human population when scientists observed that the virus mutated and was able to spread more easily. Thus, genomic sequencing was integral for identifying new variants of concern (VOC) and variants of interest (VOI), identified hot spots of spread to mitigate outbreaks, provide crucial information in developing diagnostics and therapeutics, etc., so that scientists could better monitor and track the evolution of the virus. Global and national SARS-CoV-2 genomic repositories began to grow—e.g., Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID) and National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and, similar to GenomTrackr and PulseNet, allowed for communal access to the data in hopes that answers to fighting this virus may lie within the genomic code.

Concerns over the complexity, hands-on time, training, and expertise required to perform and analyze data that the food testing industry faced were also concerns for SARS-CoV-2 testing. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported that 58% of the clinical laboratories they surveyed struggled with staffing, in part because of the education and training needed to perform laboratory analyses. Here, again, the solution that was applied in food testing—the application of automated robotic systems—provided the solution to the challenges facing public health labs Automated robotic systems reduced the workload and reduced the expertise and training needed, making NGS possible for these short-staffed and overworked public health laboratories.

Industry Intersections

Food microbiologists and clinical diagnostics laboratories have aimed to answer the same basic question: Is there an infectious agent present that can be harmful to people? For years, I and others have been applying advances in biotechnology to improve methods for answering that question. Now, we strive to answer that question with more and more resolution: How harmful is it? Is it related to other harmful pathogens? Where did it come from? Is it getting more dangerous with time?

Having worked the past couple years to make NGS solutions for the food testing market, I have witnessed the power that higher level resolution NGS data provides to answer these questions, as well as the challenges in making this technology more widely available and accessible. Public health labs, having seen these same benefits, are now striving to expand WGS analysis of SARS-CoV-2 specimens. Fortunately, the roadmap of applying automated robotic systems to NGS was already proven in the food testing industry, and easily applied and quickly adopted by SARS-CoV-2 testing laboratories.

This technology—first developed in food testing laboratories—is now in use in public health laboratories nationwide, giving scientists crucial insights to fight the global pandemic. In return, advances in streamlining SARS-CoV-2 NGS workflows are now being explored to improve food pathogen NGS methods, further demonstrating the cumulative benefits of applying technological advances across industries.

Lin is a staff scientist at Clear Labs, a provider of automated, next-generation sequencing platforms for diagnostics. Reach him at andrew.lin@clearlabs.com.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching effects on all aspects of the food manufacturing industry, including environmental monitoring programs (EMPs), an essential element to any food safety and quality regimen.

According to Sedgwick’s 2021 Recall Index, during the second quarter of 2021, the U.S. saw 106 food recalls, which affected 7.9 million units and were attributed to undeclared allergens, product quality, lack of inspection, bacterial contamination, and foreign material contamination. As a result of the pandemic, consumers are more aware of food safety than ever before. Even though the overall number of recalls is still lower than pre-pandemic levels, there are numerous lessons the food industry can take away from the heightened expectations consumers have today for safe, quality food products. Each player within the industry has a role in ensuring food quality and safety, and establishing and maintaining an efficient and effective EMP can help increase the likelihood of delivering a safe finished product.

During the pandemic, labor shortages and the need for social distancing caused food processors and labs to adjust the way they operate. Weak points in processes and opportunities to improve facilities became apparent as manufacturers struggled to keep up with demand and experienced a lack of resources.

Here are four critical trends processors should embrace as they continue working to strengthen their EMPs.

1. Food Safety Education and Cross Training

QA technicians have had to take on new responsibilities due to the increased labor turnover industry wide and the challenges posed by COVID-19. With new responsibilities and the need for speedy onboarding, continuous education is instrumental in keeping up with testing needs. Manufacturers can meet demand without sacrificing product quality or safety by creating a continuous learning program and establishing a streamlined onboarding and training process.

Similarly, in the wake of pandemic turnover, it has become clear that the best EMPs are those that involve a cross-functional group from their organization. Not only does this allow organizations to use wider expertise on the product and process, but it also ensures that the whole team knows the value of environmental monitoring and preserves an institutional focus on safety, even in the face of high turnover. Many of the food safety controls in place at a plant rely on people, so ensuring that the whole team understands the goals and importance of the program can provide the “why” behind day-to-day tasks. Cross-functional teams can also define areas of potential failure so that when things go wrong, they can be corrected swiftly and efficiently.

2. Virtual Training

The need for virtual versus in-person training to help stop the spread of COVID-19 resulted in more comprehensive and technology-based virtual training programs in the industry. Where training used to be mainly in person and slide-based, the majority of programs now incorporate virtual reality to increase the level of detail and understanding among trainees.

3. Regularly Review EMPs and Historical Trends

One of the best ways to proactively approach environmental monitoring is to have those employees most familiar with the data and facility regularly analyze trends of quantitative data. It can be difficult to keep up with production needs and still find time to analyze data trends throughout the course of the year. As manufacturers strive to keep up with the short-term goal of releasing product or releasing zones, many only look at whether a point passes or fails rather than how it’s trending over time and what the long-term implications of those trends could be. By regularly analyzing the trending data, manufacturers can identify a problem in a caution zone and anticipate a failure before it happens, identify vulnerable areas of the plant, and work toward continuous improvement.

Another good practice is implementing caution zones. Rather than having pass or fail cutoffs for EMP test results, establishing caution zones can help alert the plant to a potential upcoming failure before it happens in the hygiene zone or on a product contact surface. This can help bring attention to problems such as the need for a additional training, a sanitizer changeover, replacement of out-of-date equipment, or a growth niche before they become bigger problems.

4. Creating a “Food Safety Culture”

As a result of the pandemic, some organizations have experienced a renewed sense of purpose; as a result, we have seen an increased emphasis on food safety culture and the creation of guidelines around what this entails. While not a direct result of COVID-19, one example of this renewed interest in food safety culture is the most recent update of the Safe Quality Food (SQF) Institute’s Food Safety Code. At the end of 2020, SQF shared a number of updates for its guidelines for food manufacturing, including adding the need to “establish and maintain a food safety culture within the site” and training requirements around “sampling and test methods, environmental monitoring and allergen management, food defense, and food fraud for all relevant staff.”

Management should work to create a culture in the plant that encourages finding a positive or identifying a vulnerable area of the plant. Testing programs should emphasize sampling locations most likely to find the target organism and require aggressive response to positive samples. Educational resources should be readily accessible, as well.

Though the pandemic has presented challenges in establishing and maintaining EMPs, it’s also helped shed light on the critical role of education, the usefulness of virtual training, the need to continually review EMPs and the importance of establishing a food safety culture.

Vieth is the U.S. technical services representative for 3M Food Safety. Reach her at mvieth@mmm.com.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has taken a toll on many U.S. industries, and the food industry is no exception. In particular, food supply chain and safety issues have mounted as the pandemic has worn on.

“Food manufacturers have had to juggle a lot, including maintaining a sufficient number of qualified workers, having raw materials available, and meeting increasing demand for products,” says Martin Bucknavage, MS, MBA, CFS, senior food safety extension associate and program team leader of industrial food safety and quality in the department of food science at Penn State University in University Park.

Workforce availability has been among the biggest challenges. “Initially, there were worker absences as well as facility shutdowns related to COVID illnesses or prevention,” Bucknavage says. “Now, facilities are facing worker shortages due to hiring difficulties along with higher turnover levels.”

Raw material availability is another huge challenge for many companies, because specific ingredients can be difficult to obtain. “Again, workforce availability is the driver,” Bucknavage says. “This impacts a company’s production scheduling and forecasting.”

Many logistical issues also exist, whether it’s delays of imported goods getting unloaded at shipping ports or trucking issues impacting the movement of raw materials or finished products, Bucknavage says.

Consequences

As a result of the pandemic, labor shortages have occurred at many stages of the farm-to-table process, including at production, food safety, quality assurance, and supervisory/management levels. “This could result in a regression or de-prioritization of food safety culture, which inevitably results in more product contamination events and product recalls,” says Steve Kluting, Esq., national director of product recall for food and agribusiness at Gallagher, a commercial insurance and risk management firm in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Food manufacturing facilities have had to increase wages to retain and attract workers, says Glenn Drees, CSP, CPCU, managing director of food and agribusiness at Gallagher in Cincinnati, Ohio. Shipping and logistics costs are expected to keep rising in 2022. In some instances, certain products are unavailable or are in short supply. All of these costs are passed down throughout the supply chain, resulting in higher consumer prices.

John L. Kent, PhD, clinical professor of supply chain management at Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, anticipates a lack of consistency. “Order size variation from anywhere in the supply chain, including purchases by end consumers, creates a bullwhip effect, with peaks and valleys of inventory,” he says. “Prior to 2020, supply chain professionals had almost perfected most of the farm-to-fork food supply chains. Other than weather, a strike, or food safety recall, not much variation occurred because well-managed supply chains with trusted partners were established.”

Another effect of the pandemic has been that many food companies have had to reformulate certain foods and haven’t been able to produce certain SKUs because they couldn’t obtain some ingredients from international sources, says David Acheson, MD, former associate commissioner for foods and current CEO and president of The Acheson Group, a global food safety and public health consulting team based in Bigfork, Mont. In particular, China, a significant supplier, experienced many logistical issues and labor challenges due to COVID-19.

Furthermore, many ships outside of major ports such as Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif., were unable to get to port and unload due to pandemic-related issues, Dr. Acheson says.

Ensuring Product Availability

So how can a food manufacturer guarantee that there’s a sufficient supply of their product? According to Dr. Acheson, food companies should avoid having a sole source supplier whenever possible. “If a sole supplier has a problem such as a labor shortage or breakdown at their facility, a manufacturer that needs that product will be in a pickle,” Dr. Acheson says.

To prevent this from occurring, Dr. Acheson recommends having at least two suppliers for any critical ingredient. “But that is easier said than done,” he says. “A food company needs to vet and qualify suppliers.”

Some companies are choosing to act as their own suppliers by sourcing their own needs, says Bob Grote, CEO of Grote Company, a food equipment manufacturer in Columbus, Ohio, who adds that vertical integration, which was prevalent a century ago, may be rising again. “Serving as your own supplier helps reduce the unpredictability of relying on outside suppliers, which is what some are experiencing now,” he says.

Another strategy to avoid limited inventory is to stockpile critical ingredients; however, this can only be done if a product is shelf stable and the manufacturer has sufficient warehouse storage. “This can be problematic because it can tie up substantial capital in ingredients just sitting there,” Dr. Acheson says. Thus, for economic reasons, many food companies have done the opposite—they’ve shifted to a just-in-time kind of approach in which they don’t carry a lot of ingredient inventory, making them vulnerable to any delivery delays.

Having a nimble supply chain is the key to ensuring product availability, Bucknavage says. This includes establishing secondary suppliers, obtaining assurances for supply availability and stability, having back-up production schedules, and communicating with customers on product availability. An important part of this is recognizing the limitations of internal resources, specifically labor.

By planning ahead and thinking through what inventory they may need, Grote says processors can keep up with product demand. “Conventional wisdom may be to keep inventory lower, but in our current business climate, it can be better to buy more,” he says. “Without inventory to sell, processors can’t count on revenue. Buying what’s needed from suppliers means production can continue.”

Success Stories

Some companies tout success in ensuring product availability. Ryan Hanan, chief operating officer at Hanan Products in Hicksville, N.Y., has employed several strategies, many of which were in place long before the pandemic. “As a family company, we’ve developed deep relationships with customers who trust we’re doing the best for them; they have remained loyal even during pressing times,” he says. “We’re nimble and can take actions such as overstocking, which helps eliminate dependence on incoming materials in real time.”

Hanan has also been successful in securing future contracts, which locks in a price for a set period—granting a time of stability. Even future contracts have been slapped with additional increases, however, for arbitrary costs such as trucking fees, pallet costs, and gas fees, which Hanan Products must pay.

Being a smaller company has its advantages, Hanan says.  For example, it’s much easier for a smaller company to receive one pallet of raw materials when an ingredient is in short supply than it is for a big company to receive 20 pallets in that situation.

Some measures that Pat Schwartz, vice president of product and operations at Perfect Keto, a food manufacturer in Austin, Texas, has taken to mitigate supply chain risk include placing larger blanket purchase orders to ensure proper stock and raw material procurement and providing six to 12-month rolling forecasts to its suppliers and manufacturers to ensure proper supply and production planning.

Schwartz has carried more inventory than what’s ideal and has reformulated certain products with more stable supply chain ingredients. “We’ve put more emphasis on looking upstream into our supply chain to understand where things come from, what ports they go through, how quickly we can re-supply, and how stable the supply chain is for future needs,” he says.

Food Safety Concerns

Along with food supply shortages, food safety concerns have also increased during the pandemic. Producing food safely requires individuals who work in food lines to perform their jobs well. “Labor shortages forced a greater reliance on inexperienced temp workers, who can increase food safety risk,” Dr. Acheson says. “New workers don’t know what they don’t know. They aren’t necessarily careless, but an experienced employee may see something that doesn’t look or feel right and bring it to their supervisor’s attention, whereas a new employee may not.”

Proper sanitation at a food production plant also plays an integral role in food safety. “There are often labor challenges with sanitation, because it’s such a tough job,” Dr. Acheson says. “Cleanliness is one of the first things that gets squeezed when there are labor shortages.” For example, the amount of time spent on cleaning may be shortened, or there may be a greater number of days between cleanings.

Along these lines, Grote says that labor safety and sanitation standards are at risk with new employees consistently cycling through a plant. “Training and, in some cases, retraining, is of greater importance,” he says. “Increasing the use of robotics may result in more sanitary processing conditions overall.”

Shortages can result in desperate measures being taken. “If you can’t meet a customer’s requests, it can be tempting to take shortcuts—such as substituting ingredients for lower quality ingredients or something that looks the same but isn’t,” Dr. Acheson says. “That may be done without any thought to causing harm, but it could occur.”

Schwartz saw a decline in in-person regulatory visits and onsite audits and an increase in virtual audits in 2020 and 2021, a situation that may continue well into 2022. “This can raise concerns about an audit’s quality and information being collected,” he says. “Manufacturers might only show you what they want to show you.”

Impact on the Food and Beverage Industries

The food supply chain crisis during the pandemic brought numerous issues to the forefront, including increased prices, increased demand for food, and a lack of inventory for necessary essential items. “E-commerce will not slow down; the industry has been forced to transform out of necessity, with technology supporting greater safety and convenience, contactless shopping, and delivery options—which all depend on high-quality interoperable, standardized data,” says Liz Sertl, senior director of retail grocery community engagement at GS1 US in Ewing Township, N.J. The information standards organization brings industry communities together to solve supply chain problems through the adoption and implementation of GS1 Standards.

Due to COVID-19, Daniel Hooker, MBA, senior lecturer and director of applied economics and management/food industry management at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., says lower velocity brands and products have been discontinued to focus on higher velocity products. “This will be short term, and then innovation will return,” he says. In addition, he expects larger and more financially stable retailers and manufacturers to thrive and grow—potentially squeezing out smaller players.

Grote expects less of a demand for traditional dining-in at restaurants, while the demand for food-to-go may continue to increase. He also foresees an increase in prices, a reduction in SKUs, an increase in preservatives used to keep food fresh longer, and a continued move toward automation.

Greater Impacts on Certain Sectors

The meat industry and produce sectors have had the greatest disruptions from the pandemic. “Long supply chains for cattle and pig slaughter take longer to work out,” Drees says. “It can take years to recover from reduced herds. A lack of workers for produce harvest has led to some crops rotting in fields.”

Dr. Acheson says that the meat and poultry industries were hit hard early in the pandemic because they were more reliant on manual labor. “These manufacturing facilities are designed deliberately for people to work in close proximity on a processing line; people can work very efficiently that way.” This led to some meat and poultry plants closing due to COVID-19—more than any other supplier—and labor shortages remain a big challenge for many large manufacturers. 

Meanwhile, longer shelf-life items such as frozen foods have become more popular, most likely because they can be stored longer than perishable foods. Hooker expects this trend to continue and grow in the near term.

The pandemic also led more people to cook at home, which resulted in increased grocery store purchases. “Behaviors changed because restaurants closed down or were operating under restrictions,” Grote says. Behavior changes such as these mean that processors have to consider how they package what they sell; it may mean packaging meat in smaller or different portions, for example.

The Outlook

In the short term, worker shortages and turnover are expected to continue. “This will push companies to place greater attention on training, especially on aspects that affect food safety,” Bucknavage says. “Hiring practices will continue to evolve as competition for workers, especially skilled workers, becomes more intense.”  Without well-trained, capable employees, particularly those who oversee and manage food safety, the risk of issues is higher.

Along with this concern, Bucknavage says that raw material supply issues will continue as these suppliers face ongoing logistical and workforce issues. Companies have learned to adapt to a less-stable supply chain; newer procedures will likely become part of normal operations. Companies have refined their product mixes with a focus on simplification in an effort to avoid empty slots on store shelves.

Finally, Bucknavage says inflationary pressures will impact customer purchases as prices rise due to increasing ingredient prices, operational costs (e.g., employee wages, energy), and logistical costs. As consumer buying power is impacted by inflation, demand for certain products will change, impacting long-term forecasting and scheduling.

Grote believes that inflation could affect the food industry more than supply chain issues, as it may remain a factor for a longer term. “We could expect prices to rise for a few more years,” he says. Inflation affects everything. If processors need to spend more to manufacture products, those costs are passed on to consumers.”

Coming full circle, if the pandemic has caused workers to leave their jobs, might inflation cause them to return to those jobs? “We’ll have to wait and see,” Grote says.

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As COVID-19 continues to surge across America, with the latest data showing that one in five Americans are now exposed to the highly contagious Omicron variant, the disease is severely impacting meat production. In fact, USDA reports that beef processors slaughtered 112,000 cattle on January 14, 2022, a decrease of approximately 6% from one year prior, and the lowest number recorded since October 2021. Additionally, pig slaughtering saw a decrease of 5% percent in 2021 over 2020 rates.

The reasoning is simple: The increasing rates of infection among workers are forcing meat plants to slow production, and the government isn’t able to staff its slaughterhouse inspections adequately enough.

Paula Schelling-Soldner, chair of the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, which represents approximately 6,400 meat and poultry inspectors, noted that USDA meatpacking inspectors are increasingly testing positive to COVID-19, and that has caused a slowing in production. “The positive tests within the plants in various locations are on the uprise, just as they are everywhere else,” she tells Food Quality & Safety. “It’s the inspectors and plant personnel, which is creating—in many cases—slower production.”

She added that the staffing issue is a concern across the country, leading to a lower supply of meat and poultry, and higher prices.

These are the same problems that the industry experienced at the very beginning of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, and although things improved once vaccinations became available, it’s been tough to maintain a level of consistency.

The Biden administration is taking steps to address these issues by committing $1 billion to improving U.S. meat and poultry production, which includes $32 million dollars in grants to expand capacity and efficiency.

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Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, people around the world have eaten billions of meals and, despite significant rates of infection throughout food processing, handling, distribution, and retailing facilities, there appears to be no conclusive evidence that the disease has been transmitted from the source of infection via the food supply chain.

There has been considerable discussion in Japan about the connection between food and the potential risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission through food and the potential implications for food safety. The context for this has been the Japanese media reporting on news that Chinese regulatory authorities have detected the virus on frozen food products and speculation that an employee infection cluster in a Japanese food factory was caused by food contact. Recent announcements from China seem to indicate that this mode of transmission may have contributed to the global pandemic. Because China is one of Japan’s closest neighbors and exports foods to the country, these allegations cannot be ignored.

Furthermore, a recent increase in norovirus cases in Japan attributed to food has added to concerns about viral transmission via food. The norovirus season is generally observed from early autumn to mid-winter, but outbreaks have occurred in spring and summer. While norovirus and SARS-COV-2 are both viruses, they are very different in structure and in how they are affected in different environments. For example, alcohol does not adversely affect norovirus, but is effective for disinfection and as a countermeasure against COVID-19. It is imperative to understand the relationship between COVID-19 and food and to clarify how that coronavirus differs from norovirus.

Viruses usually remain viable and stable at cooler temperatures, even at a domestic refrigerator temperature of approximately 4℃. They are not inactivated, remaining viable for months. They do not lose their infectivity even at -70℃.

One report indicates that COVID-19 is able to maintain viability and will remain infective for between four and 21 days at 4℃. Therefore, it is not improbable to see reports that the virus was detected on frozen products. There are reports that COVID-19 has been isolated on chicken meat from Brazil and on shrimp from Ecuador.

Viral Infection from Food

There are two proposed routes for viral infection from food. In the first route, it is theorized that COVID-19 adheres to the surface of food, food containers, and packaging and is released through handling, allowing the virus to enter the body via the mucous membranes of the mouth, nose, and eyes. The second route involves COVID-19 that is present on or in food products that are consumed and the theory says this causes infection through the epithelial cells of the digestive tract and thereby proliferates. Neither of these routes have yet been verified.

Experiments with coronavirus attached to various materials in the laboratory have shown that the virus retains its infectivity on the surface of objects for quite some time. COVID-19

Reprinted from J Hosp Infect, vol. 104, Persistence
of coronaviruses on inanimate surfaces and their
inactivation with biocidal agents, pages 246-254.
Copyright 2020, with permission from Elsevier.

has been compared with the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus that prevailed in 2002 and the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) first reported in 2012, and it is thought that it will have a similar lifespan (see Table 1).

However, in reality, food does not appear to be a significant or likely path to infection with SARS-CoV-2. Experts at the World Health Organization have emphasized that China has sampled very large volumes of food packaging but found very few positive samples. In addition, there have been questions regarding the test methods employed by the Chinese researchers.

The theories about the consumption route to infection come with certain concerns. COVID-19 has an outer membrane called an envelope. It’s believed that the envelope makes it easier for the virus to attach to specific cells in the mucous membrane and multiply. However, the envelope is fragile when exposed to an acidic environment; therefore, the virus would lose its infectivity when exposed to stomach acids.

Norovirus has no envelope, and its protein is exposed. Normally, this protein has some resistance to acids. Therefore, even if food containing norovirus enters the mouth and is digested, it retains the ability to pass through the stomach acids and reach the small intestine, resulting in food poisoning. Stomach acid has a pH of about 2.

Envelope viruses are stable at pH 5-9 and have little resistance to an acidic environment, so even if the new coronavirus is eaten, the envelope will be broken and viral activity will be lost when it comes into contact with stomach gastric acid. So, contracting an infection through this route is not believed to be possible. It is reported that norovirus can tolerate a pH of 3, however, so if you eat foods high in norovirus, there is the potential that some of them will pass through your stomach acids and enter your small intestine. The end result is that norovirus can cause food poisoning, but that the new coronavirus does not.

Gastrointestinal issues such as diarrhea may affect people infected with the new coronavirus. It’s believed that this may occur after the new coronavirus has entered the lungs and spread through blood vessels, eventually reaching the digestive tract. This route has not been confirmed, however, and the WHO and the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare have not declared that infection by food does not occur.

It’s obviously quite confusing for the average person trying to understand the realities of viral infectivity. No one can say that the chances of both the first and second routes are zero, but the odds of food or food packaging being the cause of a COVID-19 infection are extremely low. Therefore, infection from food is regarded as highly unlikely and is considered even more unlikely if one looks at Japanese food factories. They typically have highly developed food hygiene processes and generally have a commitment to a food safety culture that minimizes the potential for foodborne infection.

The Difference Between COVID-19 and Norovirus

Recently, the norovirus infection rate has increased noticeably in Japan. Norovirus is different from the new coronavirus both in terms of viability in stomach acid and heat resistance. Generally, norovirus is inactivated by exposure to temperatures between 85℃ and 90℃ for more than 90 seconds. The new coronavirus is inactivated at 70℃. Furthermore, there are earlier significant differences in how the two viruses react to different chemicals used for disinfecting (see Table 2).

Because the new coronavirus has an envelope, alcohol and surfactants, such as soap or detergent, that break the envelope work well. Of course, a sodium hypochlorite solution (made by diluting bleach at home) is also effective. On the other hand, because norovirus has no envelope, it’s actually quite strong against alcohol and surfactants in detergents or soaps. In other words, these do not work. Sodium hypochlorite solution must be used to disinfect norovirus.

Understanding the infection route of norovirus makes it easier to understand the countermeasures. Norovirus propagates in the human body but cannot multiply in food or on its surfaces. There are also contact infections through doors and toilets, and droplet infections. Therefore, as countermeasures against norovirus, food should be heated to inactivate the virus before eating, and an infected person should not handle food or cook. Wash hands thoroughly before doing anything with food, and disinfect with the appropriate chemicals.

Today, the real concerns with food poisoning come from pathogenic bacteria such as Campylobacter, Salmonella, and Listeria monocytogenes, not viruses.

Dr. Kubomura is president of Kubomura Food Advisory Consultants. Reach her at kubomura.food@gmail.com.

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