Approximately 600 million people globally fall victim to food poisoning annually; of those, 420,000 succumb to foodborne illnesses, according to the World Health Organization. Improper handling during food production and the packaging process can introduce bacteria, parasites, and viruses that cause foodborne diseases. Those in the food industry should learn and practice mandatory safety precautions to reduce food contamination and poisoning. Food safety is a set of practices for aiding in the safe processing, handling, packaging, and distribution of food products.

Whether you have a multi-billion-dollar food production industry, a roadside kiosk, or a mini-bakery, you should invest in employee food safety training. Food safety training is available in in-person, real-time, and online training sessions. Real-time food safety training presents a one-on-one virtual connection between the trainer and the trainee.

A food safety training session facilitated through real-time communication lets the trainer offer a real-time presentation of the live activities from the trainer’s end. The sessions involve using session initiation protocol (SIP) and real-time transport protocol (RTP) to create and sustain communication between the involved parties.

The Importance of Effective Communication

Effective communication fosters a seamless connection between trainers and trainees during complex and long food safety training sessions. Real-time communications systems establish uninterrupted food safety training without message alteration or confusion. In this rewarding learning atmosphere, each party feels satisfied and engaged. There are many reasons to get everyone in your company trained to handle food safely, including:

• Improving the handling and maintenance of machines;
• Increasing sanitization and cleanliness of components;
• Reducing food packaging leaks;
• Reducing food contamination and poisoning issues;
• Improving the quality and health of food products delivered to
  clients; and
• Boosting brand image and reputation.

The average human has a relatively low attention span of 8.25 seconds, and effective communication is the key to extending these short spans. Boring safety training sessions could reduce a learner’s attention span, so trainers need to communicate effectively to get trainees fully engaged and boost their attention spans.

There are no boredom issues during training sessions in which the speaker and audience communicate effectively. Trainees will ask the right questions, and the trainer will answer them correctly, facilitating efficient learning.

Training sessions in which resourceful communication is the center of everything foster problem solving, active listening, nonverbal communication, confidence, and questioning.

Top Benefits of Communication During Food Safety Training

Sometimes, employees may not properly respond to food safety-related hazards. Training informs workers and boosts their confidence levels so they can raise alarms when they detect potential hazards. Properly trained employees understand the basic protocols to handle food during packaging and distribution to reduce the potential for leakage and contamination.

Communication is an indispensable tool in food safety training and determines the learning curves of each involved party. Food handler training increases knowledge and equips learners to address future food safety issues more easily. Learners can only grasp food safety protocols and management systems when the training programs are communicated effectively.

When a food safety trainer passes information effectively to the target audience without leaving holes, they help them better understand the key points of interest while preparing them to practice what they learn in the future.

Training programs with clear and easy-to-understand training materials enable workers to properly comprehend lifelong and new safety practices. Proficient communication can help learners understand and complete their training courses much faster while increasing the success rates of the training programs.

Food industries should adopt training programs that use clear and feasible videos and photos, infographics formatting, and all-inclusive training materials. Message recipients feel more at ease when training messages are presented knowledgeably and confidently.

Best Practices

To reduce misunderstandings, real-time food safety training supports key facets of communication, such as facial expressions, eye contact, and body language. As a trainer offering real-time food safety training programs, it integrates engagement, logistics, scope, etiquette, and facilitation. Training focused on these fundamental aspects helps with troubleshooting issues, implementing safety strategies, and gives insights on planning.

Proper scope and preplanning: Although virtual training sessions cannot replace in-person interactions, proper preplanning and strategizing help you create the best scopes to optimize and track the training sessions. Know the topics to address, the length of the session, the availability of training materials, and the credulity of the lecturers. Create an interactive real-time online training session by allowing participants to ask questions and give suggestions when necessary. Longer sessions will get participants bored. Limit the programs to about three hours with 10-minute breaks to reduce screen fatigue.

Practice etiquette. The host’s etiquette is one thing that can break or make a training program a success. The host has to set clear session rules and press accountability penalties to limit misconduct. Everyone in attendance must avoid distractions and behaviors that could affect other learners’ attention spans and listening abilities. Effective communication requires sticking to the main agenda and not wandering outside the session-specific topics. Timing should be a priority, ensuring timed sessions for the welcome, guest speaker instruction, breaks, and wrap up.

Engagement. Virtual food safety training programs offer a seamless engagement, interaction, and knowledge acquisition platform. But since there is no in-person connection, attendees can get bored and lose focus. Calling those in attendance by name fosters smooth interaction while keeping everyone alert. Using “raise hand” unmute and chat features to answer open-ended questions can boost engagement. The use of virtual tools such as surveys, polls, and whiteboards reduces screen fatigue and boosts knowledge retention while increasing engagement.

Real-Time Communication During Food Safety Training

Real-time food safety training hosts and facilitators can use two basic ways to present their programs. The best method depends on the availability of resources and everyone’s location.

In-person training sessions: These sessions offer opportunities for face-to-face interaction, which can provide greater understanding and clarity than virtual methods. The heart-to-heart, human-level interaction offers a hands-on learning experience. These sessions are more collaborative, as multiple learners can attend classes simultaneously. The person-to-person connection between learners and lecturers makes learning fun and more interactive.

Interactive online training modules. These modules offer a greater range of programs, cost-effective sessions, and the opportunity to connect and interact with people from around the world. These programs are streamed in real-time from the host/facilitator’s computer to the learners’ device. Although cost-effective, they don’t offer the same person-to-person connections as in-person training sessions.

Farrell is president of PlantTours.

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For many years, the concept of “big data” has been framed as a key to help resolve various challenges and drive improvements across many business segments. The potential of big data, however, can sometimes get lost when applied to food safety. With minimal food safety “positive” testing results from which to mine data and glean insights into potential environmental or product contamination, the food industry must evolve to take the “small data” that is gathered from incidents and augment it with expertise in microbiology and food safety to solve complex challenges. This will unlock actionable insights for smarter, more dynamic risk assessment in food safety and quality control.

This approach, called “augmented diagnostics,” is rigorously grounded in science and delivers data reporting and test results, as well as in-depth insights to help food industry leaders make better decisions that will drive efficiency while also improving public health.

For augmented diagnostics to succeed in solving food safety and quality challenges, an organization must be willing to invest in two key areas: advanced tools to gather enhanced data, information, and expertise in data science, and microbiology and food processing to analyze the data and provide recommendations for the best path forward.

With so many options for diagnostic testing solutions available in the market, finding the right partner that indexes highly against both of these areas can seem deceptively straightforward. In a sea of options, it’s important to understand not just what types of technology are available, but also finding the right tool to address the specific goals or challenges an organization is trying to solve, while ensuring the expertise of the selected lab partner fits both current and future needs.

Leverage the Right Data

Traditionally, microbiology testing in food has been reactive; results and data captured from a point in time are returned one to three days following sample collection. Organizations have tried to move to a proactive model for risk anticipation, seeking to apply big data methodology to food safety problems. As discussed above, big data requires significant inputs, and the finite “positive case” data in food safety is a hurdle for effective application of this method; however, this is just one limitation of employing a big data approach when it comes to food safety.

In addition to requiring an abundance of data for successful implementation, this approach is most successful when employed in structured and static environments. The challenge in food safety is that a food processing facility is not a simple, static environment. Processes are complex, with a lot of moving parts, and there are a high number of ever-
changing variables that can affect food safety and quality, such as environmental issues, compromised raw materials, or contamination in the process. Big data algorithms will only return broad stroke results to answer large-scale questions. There is no substitute for subject matter expertise and a diagnostic partner to ensure insights are tailored for each specific circumstance. Simply put, there is no big, off-the-shelf solution to ensure food safety and quality.

Unlock New Insights

While data can be collected across food processing—from raw materials to end-user consumption—positive testing results are the most important anchor points that drive actionable insights. Now, more than ever, molecular diagnostic tools—both new and familiar tools being applied to food safety—are giving organizations the ability to truly focus on specific areas and understand their specific “small data” for the first time. Two examples of molecular diagnostic tools that are currently leveraged for organizations to focus on this small data include whole genome sequencing (WGS) and metagenomics.

WGS: Well known across the diagnostic testing industry, WGS is gaining traction as more organizations leverage this tool to provide more in-depth information about specific contaminations. One barrier to wider adoption of this technology in the food safety sector is the in-depth data that the application returns, which can cause hesitancy due to the fact that data is potentially discoverable and may lead to unattended consequences for the organization.

While this is an understandable concern, it’s encouraging to see an increasing number of organizations adopt WGS as they find that the benefits for their company far outweigh the risks. The more in-depth data an organization has, the better it can understand the situation and implement solutions to address current issues, as well as those that may emerge upstream in the production process, to maximize ROI. For WGS application to be successful, an organization should work with an experienced partner that can go beyond supplying merely a sequence of data reporting for an in-house team to try and decipher; you’ll want a partner that delivers in-depth insights into the data and suggests actions to enhance your quality programs.

Metagenomics: This is another powerful tool that can unlock the mysteries lying within an organization’s small data. The application of metagenomics returns enhanced analysis of what a food product’s actual microbiome is, which allows an organization to isolate and target relevant spoilerage organisms to then implement enhanced screening processes across production, which can better control risk. One significant barrier to applying metagenomics is the idea that too much data can result in limited application opportunities or in cumbersome process overhauls. Think of metagenomics as not necessarily a focus on a wider set of data but rather as a focus on the right data that can enhance your organization’s decision-making capabilities.

In both cases, data gathered from molecular tools, when paired with existing internal and external data, results in the opportunity to connect the dots across an organization to better anticipate potential risk.

Leverage Data Science

Many times, those responsible for decision making do not have a microbiology background. This is fine, as responsibilities for senior leaders in food safety and quality extend far beyond diagnostic testing, but what we find is that sometimes our customers are intimidated by data approaches. The best way to raise confidence in data analysis capabilities is to invest in infrastructure that supports data science. This can be achieved by carving out room for dedicated data scientists within an organization or by outsourcing to a diagnostics partner. Whichever direction you choose, it’s imperative to work with your team at the onset to set your organization up for success. Two ways to do this are by properly framing the question you’re working on and through partnership and alliance.

Framing the question: Data is useless if it doesn’t answer your most pertinent questions. Think of Google, which provides a gateway into an infinite amount of knowledge; however, the only way you get to access the knowledge that you seek is to ask Google the question you are most interested in finding the answer to. This is why combining expertise in microbiology and food processes with data science is so important; a team that possesses these three skillsets is able to perform the work to frame the right question and to ensure that the data gathered provides a meaningful answer.

Partnership and alignment: Organizations must be transparent with their in-house and external diagnostic partners about their strengths as well as their gaps so that they can identify the right solutions to better anticipate risks. In turn, diagnostic partners must be transparent about the decision criteria that the recommended tools are built on. The notion that no two organizations are the same extends into the diagnostic testing category as well: No two testing stories are the same. The key to a thriving augmented diagnostics approach to food safety relies on full collaboration between stakeholders to leverage the wider industry insights and unique considerations, ensuring success for the organization. There is no off-the-shelf solution to augmented diagnostics.

The food safety industry as a whole is collectively leaning forward when it comes to the best ways to leverage augmented diagnostics to fuel discovery and further understanding. As we look beyond simple, point-in-time data testing, an investment in data augmentation to tell a more compelling story of your organization’s risk offers benefits for both consumers through the advancement of public health, and the organization via more bottom line efficiencies. Diagnostic testing partners should drive value by unlocking new information and providing actionable insights to empower food safety and quality leaders to make more informed decisions.

Defferrard is associate director, augmented diagnostics, Americas, at bioMérieux and has a degree in biological engineering and a master’s in microbiology and food safety. Reach him at julien.defferrard@biomérieux.com.

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One of the most overlooked assets for many food processors is their workforce. There is a great deal of focus on food safety and quality, food safety culture, and prerequisite programs, but when it gets down to brass tacks, the line workers and their performance are what ensures that the plant operates as it should.

The role of production, sanitation, quality, and warehousing supervisors is to manage the operation and ensure that the company’s quality, safety, and sanitation programs are developed, documented, implemented, and—most importantly—properly maintained. It’s up to individual workers to conduct their jobs properly to ensure that programs are maintained. The key to maintaining the food quality and safety system is, as mentioned, developing and documenting programs, and then making sure that workers are properly educated so that they understand not only what is expected of them, but the rationale behind these expectations.

The Preventive Controls for Human Food rule found in title 21 of FDA’s CFR parts 117.10 and 117.37 emphasizes the need for programs such as disease control, handwashing, proper garments, and basic cleanliness, and is focused on people and equipment. CFR 117.37 addresses sanitary facilities and controls. How and why these are essential should be addressed as part of employee education. The goal is to minimize the potential for cross-contamination and cross-contact on the processing floor, in the warehouse, and on receiving docks to ensure that the foods produced are safe and wholesome.

The word “education” is used in this instance because it implies that a company’s programs focus not only on how to complete something and what is expected, but also why the programs are in place.

Education or training should occur within three levels:

• Orientation for new employees (this two-part program encompasses employee guidelines and job training);
• Refresher sessions for all employees (this should occur annually); and
• Emergency sessions in response to problems.

These programs must be developed, documented, and implemented by qualified individuals, preferably a Preventive Controls Qualified Individual (PCQI), in facilities regulated by FDA. Training may, however, be conducted by people under the supervision of a PCQI.

Orientation

All new employees must not only learn how to perform the job for which they were hired, but must also be educated on what is expected from a food hygiene, safety, and sanitation perspective. There are four areas that an orientation should address above and beyond learning how to conduct the task for which employees were hired. These are:

1. Issues related to prevention of contamination or adulteration.
2. Rules pertaining to clothing and garments;
3. Employee hygiene and disease control; and
4. Eating, drinking, and smoking.

How the orientation is conducted varies among companies. Some operations may present the information in a Powerpoint presentation led by a staff member, others may show a video, and some may simply give the new employee a document to review. An interactive program with visuals is the best option. When employees see, hear, and do, there is a greater chance that the message will register with the audience. It’s a good idea to provide each new employee with a document, such as an employee handbook that describes all expectations. They should sign the document acknowledging that they have both received and understood the company’s rules. Some operations even include language in their documents such as, “I understand the rules for employees of this plant and promise to abide by them as long as I am employed by the company. I also understand that failure to follow these rules may be grounds for dismissal.”

Employee Guidelines

Let’s look at what might be included in a food processor’s employee guidelines. Here are some points that a processor might establish to minimize the potential for product contamination or adulteration:

1. Process area doors are to be kept closed at all times during production. Do not use anything to prop open the doors.
2. All ingredients are to be stored in closed containers at all times to prevent contamination. After opening a container, reseal the bag or transfer the remaining product to a clean, resealable container and label it with the date that it was opened using indelible marker or a permanent tag. These materials shall be stored on pallets or shelves. No materials shall be stored on the floor at any time.
3. Allergens and sensitizing ingredients must be stored in designated areas only and kept away from non-allergens. Designated utensils must be used when using these materials.
4. All ingredient containers must be clearly marked as to their identity to prevent misuse. If a container is not labeled, set it aside and contact management.
5. All equipment lubricants, cleaning chemicals, sanitizers, and similar items must be stored away from ingredients and packaging materials in designated storage areas to prevent possible cross contamination.
6. Do not place any objects, such as pencils, pens, or cigarettes, behind your ear at any time.
7. Any product or packaging materials that fall onto the floor must be discarded.
8. Keep waste bins covered at all times.
9. Do not place food or drinks on packaging materials, ingredients, or finished goods. Food is allowed in designated areas only.
10. Personal stereos are not allowed in the production area because they cannot be sanitized after being handled.
11. All utensils, such as knives, spoons, and scoops, must be cleaned and sanitized and stored in designated areas when not in use.
12. Production floor staff must clean, sanitize, and store all processing equipment and utensils at the end of the work day according to documented procedures.
13. Cell phones are not allowed on the production floor or the warehouse and must remain in the employee’s vehicle or locker.
14. Situations that may create food safety or quality concerns must be reported to a supervisor immediately.

When conducting the orientation, the company should not only explain how to adhere to these protocols but also why they have been established and the ramifications of failing to properly follow them.

Attire

A second area that must be addressed in the orientation is clothing and garments. Most food processors provide their line workers with clothing and safety shoes. The clothing should be comfortable (breathable fabrics) and must not pose a risk for product contamination. Guidelines for proper attire include:

1. No jewelry, including rings, brooches, watches, pins, earrings, necklaces, or visible piercings, shall be worn in the production area. The only exceptions are a plain gold wedding band, which must be covered with a glove, and medical alert bracelets. The bracelet should be covered by a long-sleeve garment with elastic wrist bands.
2. All employees and visitors must wear hair nets when working in or entering the production or warehouse areas. Hairnets must cover hair and ears.
3. All bearded employees and guests must wear snoods when working in or entering the production area. Mustaches must be fully covered.
4. No articles whatsoever, such as pens, pencils, or thermometers, may be held in uniform pockets.
5. No hairpins, combs, or barrettes may be worn by employees working in the production area.
6. Employees working in the production area may not wear false eyelashes, false fingernails, or fingernail polish.
7. All employees must wear the disposable gloves that are provided when handling product or ingredients directly. Gloves must be discarded at the end of a shift or if they become soiled or damaged.
8. Production floor employees must put on a clean uniform each day. At the end of the day, the dirty uniform must be placed in the laundry hamper.
9. Employees must wear hearing protection in designated areas (e.g., processing and boiler rooms). Proper hearing protection is defined as earmuff-type hearing protectors or metal-detectable ear plugs.

Hygiene

Then there is employee hygiene and disease control. During the COVID-19 pandemic, food plant workers had to be masked. This is no longer required, but the pandemic showed that masks can be successfully used in food processing facilities. Additionally:

1. All employees are required to thoroughly wash their hands before starting work, after using the restroom, after touching any potentially insanitary equipment or utensils, and after any break. Following washing, employees must use hand sanitizer.
2. Any employee with any signs of illness (sneezing, coughing, runny nose, or fever) shall not be allowed to work in the production area. Contact your supervisor and report your condition prior to reporting to work.
3. Any employee with open and/or infected wounds or cuts on their hands or face shall not work in the production area. Wounds on hands must be fully covered with a glove if the employee is to work in the production area.

Employee health issues are more stringent in other parts of the world. There are countries that mandate a wide range of testing for any person wishing to work in a food plant. Tests may include but need not be limited to blood tests, tuberculosis tests, stool samples, and chest X-rays. This degree of testing is not allowed in the United States.

All these issues should be addressed at length during the orientation for the new employee. Yearly refresher sessions should address those issues that management deems to be higher risk, such as handwashing, and/or those that have observed to be deficient in some way. The deficiencies might have been picked up during internal audits or through third-party audits.

Further, it’s ultimately the responsibility of management to ensure that employees are not only properly educated but also properly motivated to do what is needed to protect public health and the company’s good name.

Editor’s note: Be sure to check the most up-to-date regulations for all requirements.

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The meal kit industry continues to grow rapidly, with a market size projected to reach $17.8 billion in 2023, compared with $13.50 billion in 2022, according to a report from The Business Research Company. But this relatively new sector of the food industry faces some additional growing pains.

For example, FSIS reported last year that ground beef products in HelloFresh meal kits may have been associated with reported illnesses related to E. coli infection. Additionally, the plant-based meal delivery service Daily Harvest voluntarily recalled its French Lentil and Leek Crumbles product after dozens of people who ate the product became sick. The Wall Street Journal reported that several had to undergo gallbladder surgery after eating the product.

The flurry of alarming news raised concerns about the regulatory environment surrounding meal kit delivery services. The biggest issue? The lack of targeted regulatory oversight. For now, the places where meal kit delivery and food safety intersect represent a sort of wild west of food production and distribution.

A positive development happened in December 2022, however, when a trio of federal agencies—USDA, FDA, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—issued a 49-page guide for how to ensure food safety in the third-party delivery (TPD) industry. The guidelines are not regulations, and companies do not have to abide by the suggestions, but they represent a good first step.

Either way, the industry’s lack of specific oversight does not mean that the products completely escape safety inspections. When food products of any kind are manufactured and packaged, they follow normal federal regulations and oversight. So, that vacuum-sealed bag of chicken thighs or the pouch of rice for a kung pao chicken meal does withstand USDA and FDA scrutiny, but once it’s packaged up into a box for shipping, it’s a different story.

Navigating the “Last Mile”

The main problem with meal kit food safety revolves around everything that happens once a kit leaves a company’s facility and heads to a person’s home—what FDA dubs the “last mile.”

With traditional food channels, such as grocery stores, the link between the manufacturing facility and the refrigerated shelves of the supermarket remains intact. The trucks are refrigerated if items require refrigeration. Inspectors scrutinize the trucks for signs of rodents or insects, and for holes in the truck that allow unwanted creatures and substances to enter. When the trucks reach their destinations, workers unload the boxes and direct them to their proper places, including freezers and refrigerators. All of this undergoes recordkeeping and regulatory oversight.

But with most meal kit deliveries, oversight vanishes once the products get packed into boxes. From there, companies use services such as UPS, the U.S. Postal Service, DHL, Amazon Prime, and other delivery outfits to ship boxes to customers. What else are the trucks carrying, other than the meal kits? Potentially hazardous substances, such as containers of Drano and dishwashing detergents, aerosol cans, nail polish remover, pesticides? It might all be packed helter skelter in a delivery truck. Once the products reach their destinations, often front porches and apartment lobbies, they sit until their owners whisk them away to their kitchens and ovens. This entire leg of the journey lacks FDA or USDA oversight.

The meal kit facility itself can stand as a source of concern. A wilderness of potentially unregulated control points there could affect food safety. For example, workers at a meal kit company could use unsanitary tables to repackage food they have received from suppliers, such as meat processors.

Still, I think the larger issue hinges on delivery. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted mail service, for example. Supply chain issues combined with labor shortages and increased reliance on home deliveries snarled delivery times. With many meal kits, packages are supposed to arrive within two to three days, and the cooling device they contain will be dry ice. But what happens if it takes five to seven days to get the package out? In a regulated environment, this would be rare, but in the world of meal kit delivery, it can be anyone’s guess.

The topic has been batted around in food safety circles for several years, especially regarding food delivery in general. Uber Eats and DoorDash have become prominent channels for food delivery, but the drivers have no training in food safety. Large companies that engage with food delivery, such as national pizza chains, often train their drivers in food safety and incorporate protocols and procedures surrounding packaging and temperature control that help protect food. But with TPD services, this training is absent. The same applies to meal kits. When it comes to the delivery part of the equation, training in food safety doesn’t happen.

Safeguarding Meal Kits Without Regulations

So far, the consequences of this lack of regulation have not been especially traumatic on a grand scale, but all it takes is one big food safety fail to change everything. I do believe FDA will eventually get more involved. Perhaps they will release more than just suggested guidelines, but right now, it’s such a petite sector of the food industry that it doesn’t dwell in the bullseye of the radar.

Until the meal kit industry submits to stiff oversight, I think these companies must continue to improve. One thing they can do is perform a risk assessment to determine what could be at risk. What if the package arrives one day late, or the ice doesn’t last as long as anticipated? What if the temperature outside is especially blazing? That’s where working with experts in food safety makes a difference—they understand the key variables and can help reduce risk as much as possible.

While consumers shouldn’t assume that meal kits delivered to their doorstep are safe upon arrival, the consumer does have the critical responsibility of cooking the food to its proper temperature. The risk for E. coli, for example, diminishes dramatically when food is cooked properly. Some people like to eat burgers and hear the cow moo. It’s never a safe idea, but overly rare burgers can be especially risky with meal kit delivery. Consumers don’t know how long a package has been in transit, what kind of truck was used, and how long the package sat outside the house. Given all of these factors, it’s vital for consumers to always follow directions closely for how to cook meal kit food.

The meal kit market is a new one, and I welcome it. These companies offer consumers access to new and thrilling dishes each week, compelling them to work on their cooking skills, improve their diets, and more. Although I will always champion this market, as with any new industry, regulations lag far behind, and safety is not as strong as it is in established sectors. I encourage the companies involved to ratchet up their attention to food safety, and closely review the new federal guidelines for meal kit safety.

As the industry matures, I also encourage FDA to pay increasing attention to this exciting new category within the food and beverage industry.

Williams is chief executive officer of ASI Food Safety, an auditing, training, and consulting company based in St. Louis, Mo. Reach him at twilliams@asifood.com.

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Eastern Oregon isn’t known as an agricultural capital, but the area contains plenty of wheat farms and farmers looking to keep their crops and families supported while producing export-quality wheat. It may not be the verdant west of the state, across the Cascade Mountains, but eastern Oregon has farmers who are just as serious about their work as anywhere else.

In 2018, an especially aggressive wildfire season hit eastern Oregon, beginning in midsummer. “It burned up a lot of range lands in areas that were in crop production, primarily dryland wheat,” says Jacob E. Powell, a professor of crop and soil science in the college of agricultural sciences at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “They had one really bad fire that was 80,000 acres, and then they had some additional fires; about 120,000 acres burned in the region.” He adds that much of that was dryland planted in wheat that was fully matured, and farmers were preparing to start harvesting when these wildfires occurred.

Even for a smaller farming region such as eastern Oregon, the fires started a cascade of consequences. The 2018 fires, Powell says, resulted in “a lot less wheat being shipped down the river.” This had a chain of secondary effects. He says that grain elevators in his area of Oregon saw a 50% to 60% reduction in the number of wheat bushels they received following the fires. “Obviously the producers lost income,” he adds. “A lot of them had crop insurance, which helped cover that. But suddenly there was less work for the local wheat co-op, and all the people who are involved with getting the grain into the elevators. Then there’s the transportation chain of people—in my area, a lot of it is trucked to local elevators, and then it’s put on the Columbia River and barged to Portland. From there, it’s sent primarily to exporters overseas. So [the fire damage] had major implications for everybody involved in that whole supply chain. Suddenly there was less work for them to do.”

The wave of wildfires across the western United States has been impossible to ignore for several years, and scholars have warned that even as the annual fires may burn through and limit their own potential fuel, climate-driven factors may still create circumstances favorable to major fires in the future.

Beyond the inarguable human tragedy of these fires, there is a second crisis these events bring—that of the farmers, and the damage done to their farms. Eastern Oregon was far from the epicenter of recent wildfires. Carlos F. Gaitan Ospina is CEO of San Francisco’s Benchmark Labs, which uses AI technology to predict and prepare for severe weather events, among other disasters. He calls California’s wildfires “catastrophic for the agricultural sector and the West Coast. [And] while California’s Central Valley has seen limited impact, vineyards, specialty crops, and grazing lands from the Sierras to San Diego have been severely impacted.”

The potential damage from wildfires varies widely, say Gus Plamann and Joy Youwakim, agronomists at Biome Makers, a Sacramento, Calif.-based agricultural technology company. “Wildfires can inflict indirect damage to crops and the environment and direct destruction to structures and maintenance expenditures,” Plamann and Youwakim wrote in an email to Food Quality & Safety. “The long-term consequences of these damages can vary depending on the severity of the fire and the resilience of the impacted crops and ecosystems. For example, areas of high-severity fire can impact water quality and soil erosion.”

The Smoke Factor

Wildfires can damage crops the most direct way—by burning them up, or by reshaping the soil of the region. Another troubling factor about wildfires, however, is how smoke and pollutants can easily travel hundreds of miles from their sources.

Smoke from wildfires is a significantly damaging factor for a variety of reasons: It deposits potentially toxic ash into crops, it can block the sun to prevent healthy growing, and—perhaps, most expensively—smoke can pollute or otherwise damage crops grown for their flavor. This problem is most acute for wine-grape and cannabis growers, say Plamann and Youwakim, because those two products are sold for the complexity and subtlety of their taste profiles. Cannabis is also an especially difficult crop to protect from smoke because its resin is very sticky, making it a magnet for airborne ash and particulate.

Smoke is also a problem for hops growers, some of which Powell encounters in eastern Oregon. “The damage to flavor seems potentially extremely expensive if you get a whole crop of hops that sudden suddenly no longer tastes like hops, but tastes like smoke,” he says. “Nobody is going to want to buy or brew with that.” And the worst factor for smoke, Powell says, is how far it travels, how easily it moves, and how completely unpredictable its outcomes are. “You’re going to have a fire several hundred miles away—within a 200-mile radius, basically—and it can still mess up your harvest.”

Mike Thornton, PhD, is a professor of plant sciences at the University of Idaho in Boise, where he has researched the effects of wildfire smoke on potato crops. He says that smoke’s effects on plants are very complex. “It is really hard to separate out what the smoke itself is doing to crop productivity due to the fact that the growing seasons where we have the highest smoke exposure tend to be very dry and hot,” he says. “Those are the conditions that promote forest and range fires. We know from previous research that high temperatures are not good for the productivity of some, but not all, crop plants. Potatoes are one of the crops very sensitive to high temperatures.”

Different crops are hit by wildfires in different ways. Some are burned to the ground. Powell says that in his region, there were major concerns about soil and water erosion because, in wheat field after a fire, there is nothing left. “It’s a moonscape,” he adds. In this case, Powell says farmers had to plant an emergency covering crop to maintain soil moisture throughout the winter; however, this is a separate concern from farmers facing smoke or pollution damage.

Gaitan Ospina also stresses the fact that the impact of fire varies from crop to crop. “The time from seed to harvest for lettuce or strawberries is very different than for almonds or grapes, so for many farmers, if they go back to the same crop that they had before being affected by a wildfire, it could take five, 10, or more years to go back to the pre-wildfire conditions and income.”

What Can Farmers Do?

In all cases, there are very few actions farmers can take to protect their crops from wildfires. Powell is aware of a number of products that offer a barrier film growers can spray onto their crops to protect them from smoke damage, but it’s expensive and needs to be applied early in the fire.

Beyond that, most attempts to mitigate damage are simply efforts to avoid fires. “One step agricultural producers are taking is implementing targeted grazing to reduce invasive weeds, which may exacerbate fire length and intensity during a wildfire,” say Plamann and Youwakim. “Historically, indigenous communities, like the Karuk Tribe in Northern California, have used controlled burning as a land management tool to reduce the risk of wildfires in the future. Controlled burning can reduce fuel accumulation and promote the growth of new vegetation, often native to the region. Also, the recovery of soil organic matter is essential for soil quality restoration after a wildfire.”

Unfortunately, this has placed the need to protect against fires at odds with popular farming practices. Between 2000 and 2010, says Dr. Powell, prior to the uptick in wildfires, farmers had started to switch to a no-till approach in which they would leave crop residue in the ground to help increase yields. No-till farming was a boon for crop yields, but it also left fields full of wildfire fuel. “No-till farming is doing wonders for the soil and the bottom line for most farmers,” Powell says. “But unfortunately with these fires now, the fire burns through a field that was in crop and then hits the field that was fallow—and basically has an effective fuel.”

These are problems no farmer can afford to leave unresolved, says Jessica Todd, Sioux-City, ND-based underwriting manager for Agribusiness Risk Underwriters. With each fire, it becomes harder and harder for farmers to insure their farms and crops. “What’s happening in the insurance market is that most of these farmers are insured with standard market insurance companies,” Todd says. “They’re insured for really minimal premiums and deductible structures, so it’s something in their business plan that’s affordable. [But] it’s happening right now that some of these [major national insurance] carriers are getting out of agriculture—or getting out of areas that have a potential for a wildfire exposure because of the risk, and because they’ve taken so many losses in the last few years.”

Many farmers are discovering the companies that used to insure their crops and farms simply don’t offer that coverage anymore, and they are now stuck going from company to company trying to figure out who will still insure such high-risk properties. While Agribusiness Risk Underwriters handles insurance for high-risk business and locations, Todd stresses that the price for these products has increased significantly, as much as multiple times what farmers were previously paying. Those who can get that kind of insurance are the lucky ones. The rest won’t be able to find insurance at all.

Gaitan Ospina says that after recouping damages from wildfires, facing the rising cost of insurance is a major challenge for farmers. “In many areas, premiums have jumped [fivefold] in the last few years.”

“There are definitely farmers who aren’t going to be able to find coverage,” Todd says. “Even when you look into the excess and surplus [insurance], underwriting companies like us still have to see if it’s a suitable risk—if they have a fire prevention or a fire mitigation plan in place, if they’re keeping proper distance of brush from the buildings, if they have water trucks on site. We still have to look at all of that and actually underwrite the account. And there are times where, just because they’ve had so much wildfire history in that particular area, there isn’t anything that can be done to make it a suitable risk.”

In California, for example, farmers have the California FAIR Plan, a last-resort option created in 1968 to provide insurance to those who cannot find coverage anywhere else; however, Todd notes that the coverage is basic and limited to specific perils—so one can specifically buy wildfire insurance, or flood insurance, but not an expanded package of insurance for the full property. FAIR insurance itself was intended to offer temporary stopgap solutions; it is the opposite of the stable and dependable insurance plans farmers have relied upon so far.

The problem of uninsurable properties is one of many created by the emergence of the modern wildfire threat. For many, that means that the priority remains preventing and fighting the fires themselves. Powell has seen producers building strategic fuel-breaks into their landscapes to prevent fires from travelling, while also investing in firefighting equipment. “They don’t necessarily have huge fire trucks, but they at least have a 100-gallon tank on their truck with a pump that they know how to use,” he says. “If a small fire starts, they can at least put it out fairly quickly.”

Little tools like this work better in conjunction with others: Powell is enthusiastic about programs in Oregon and Idaho called Rangeland Fire Protection Associations (RFPAs), which help train farmers to fight fires. “They go through an abbreviated firefighting training, like professional wildland firefighters go through. They get the same radios that the local Oregon department of forestry uses, and so they’re able to communicate better with other firefighting agencies. It also allows them to purchase surplus fire equipment at a reduced rate.”

Powell notes that the logo of Rangeland Fire Prevention in Oregon includes the motto “Neighbors Helping Neighbors Fight Fires,” and he thinks this unified approach helps farming communities defend themselves far more effectively than if each farmer had to protect their farm alone. “If your neighbors are trained up to help you,” he says, “it can go a long way. When there’s a wildfire burning on your property, your neighbors are going to be the first ones there to help you, well before anybody else arrives.”

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In her eye-opening documentary “Poisoned,” filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig shines a light on the extent of contamination in the American food industry. Everyday grocery items from lettuce to chicken breasts, and even cookie dough, are sometimes tainted by dangerous levels of bacteria.

This isn’t surprising, necessarily. Romaine lettuce is frequently contaminated by E. coli O157 carried in irrigation water. Salmonella and Campylobacter, which often contaminate chicken, are prevalent in the fecal matter on chicken farms. And the cookie dough? Raw flour can carry harmful bacteria such as E. coli, which remain alive even after low-temperature baking. Raw or undercooked eggs can also introduce Salmonella into the dough, posing a risk to people who like a bite of raw dough while baking or who don’t bake their cookies long enough.

These contamination paths are built into the food production process and are hard to eliminate. That’s why, in the U.S. alone, a staggering 48 million people a year fall victim to foodborne illnesses. It’s also why we need innovative solutions to address pathogenic contamination. One such solution is ultraviolet (UV) technology. By harnessing the power of UV light, which is capable of killing harmful bacteria and pathogens in food items of all types, the food industry can reduce the prevalence and severity of food-related illnesses.

A Safe and Versatile Solution

UV technology offers a promising and pragmatic solution because it can significantly enhance food safety with minimal adverse effects on the environment or on the quality of foods.

One vital step toward improving food safety is treating irrigation water, a common source of contamination on farms. Among the disinfection methods available, UV technology is an ideal choice. Unlike chlorine, which can negatively impact plant health and the environment, UV technology provides a powerful yet safe means of eliminating pathogens from the water. By effectively neutralizing harmful microorganisms, UV treatment can ensure that irrigation water is made clean for agricultural use.

UV technology can also be used to curb the spread of pathogens in food processing plants, where it can be used as a surface disinfectant for conveyor belts. This is where a lot of cross-contamination happens and it only takes one tainted batch to spoil the rest due to the surface-to-surface transfer of pathogens.

Let’s consider a scenario in which a worker cuts up a chicken tainted with Salmonella; a single contaminated bird can contaminate an entire production line. Implementing UV surface disinfection measures would act as a robust barrier against that contamination.

The same disinfection measures could apply in fruit and vegetable processing. For instance, the outer surface of a cantaloupe is porous with a webbed texture that provides numerous crevices where bacteria can hide and thrive. Addressing this contamination is a challenge because these fruits might be irrigated with tainted water. In this case, incorporating an additional disinfection step that includes UV light makes good sense.

UV technology can even be used to disinfect food packaging. By ensuring that packaging material is free from harmful microorganisms, UV disinfection offers another layer of protection that enhances the safety and quality of the food product throughout its journey—from the point of production to the consumer’s doorstep.

Address Contamination at Its Source

Effective management of harmful pathogens requires a dual approach centered around disinfection and source-level regulations. The ultimate goal is to prevent pathogens from coming into contact with food products at the outset; however, the current regulatory framework is somewhat limited. In the farm environment, for example, regulations primarily rely on periodic testing by growers to identify the presence of pathogens such as E. coli in their water supply. These tests are conducted on an infrequent basis, often monthly or quarterly. For instance, Food Safety Modernization Act regulations in the U.S. rely on periodic, infrequent micro tests of the source water.

To enhance the safety of food products, a shift toward more proactive and real-time monitoring mechanisms is needed, as opposed to the conventional practice of collecting grab samples intermittently. UV treatment is a promising solution, offering valuable insight into water-quality variations. Through internet-connected sensors, UV technology can monitor and treat the water, actively identifying fluctuations in water quality and ensuring a swift response to any potential contaminants.

Indeed, by installing UV, growers can ensure greater regulatory compliance and higher quality food. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see large food producers offer a premium to growers who take these actions, just as dairy producers often pay a premium to farmers who consistently deliver milk with a lower microbial count.

UV technology addresses contamination concerns at the source, namely at farms and production facilities, and offers a powerful tool to intercept pathogens before they have a chance to spread through the supply chain. This approach significantly reduces the likelihood of cross-contamination and subsequent foodborne outbreaks.

One key advantage of UV technology is its potential to limit reliance on reactive measures downstream, such as product recalls and treatment of foodborne illnesses. Instead of dealing with the consequences of contamination after the fact, the integration of UV technology focuses on preventing the issue at its source. This protects public health and bolsters consumer confidence in the food they purchase, leading to stronger brand loyalty and a more resilient food industry.

Kershner is global commercial director at Nuvonic.

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The year 2023 has been to artificial intelligence (AI) what 1993 was to the internet: the year it became available to the masses. While the public debate on the impact of AI on society has just started, one of its most fascinating aspects is its potential to generate elaborate predictions based on an analysis of immense volumes of data.

For the past few years, researchers and regulators have been trying to apply this ability to food safety. FDA has made data analytics a part of its New Era of Smarter Food Safety Blueprint, an initiative the agency launched in 2020 that seeks to reduce the number of foodborne illnesses by leveraging technology to create a safer, more digital, and more easily traceable food system.

Data Sharing in the Field

Food safety organizations have also joined the AI movement. One online platform developed by the Western Growers Association, a trade organization comprising more than 2,200 farmers, aims to allow users to share food safety data. This network, called GreenLink, started in 2021 in partnership with Creme Global, an Ireland-based data analytics company, and six participating members and has grown tremendously, reaching 140 growers and 6 million data points. “Our goal is to capture and analyze field food safety data so that each operation can view it individually and compare it with an aggregated data of other operations,” says De Ann Davis, PhD, senior vice president of science for the Western Growers Association.

The GreenLink platform plans to use both descriptive and predictive models for analysis. “For example, if a water test comes back high in E. coli, we would like to be able to use descriptive analytics to explain what’s likely causing that, and predictive analytics to understand [whether] that value is expected to be high in that period of the year,” says Dr. Davis. The use of predictive analytics, however, hasn’t been implemented; GreenLink’s datasets are not yet consistent enough to start making predictions. “That doesn’t mean that in six months we won’t be able to do that, though,” she adds.

This insufficient level of consistency has to do with the freedom that the project leaves to participants to decide what data to share­—for example, field location, water or pathogen testing results, or bird activity. Such flexibility is meant to encourage members to share information that is normally treated as confidential.

The challenge of collecting non-public data is an aspect of AI in which the human factor is very much present. When sensitive company data is essential for developing AI tools, sharing it is not a spontaneous act done for the sake of the algorithm; rather, it’s a business decision taken to gauge risk versus reward.

Dr. Davis says this is a chicken-and-egg problem: “People want to know what you’re going to deliver before they go all the way in with the data, but you can’t deliver anything if they don’t provide data first. So, it’s also a matter of balancing the value they’re getting out with the amount of data they’re putting in.”

Why the Produce Industry Is Ripe for AI

Indeed, growers may be receptive to the idea of sharing data. Matt Stasiewicz, PhD, an associate professor of applied food safety at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, says, “While the produce industry is well controlled, we’re still seeing outbreaks. Yet, no single company is going to observe enough contamination events to understand truly what’s driving that risk. People are starting to realize that sharing data across companies may be the way to find answers to those questions.”

Dr. Stasiewicz is one of his university’s site leads for the AI Institute for Food Systems (AIFS), a consortium formed by six universities and USDA. One of the group’s aims is to create an AI-powered database based on information gathered from public research projects, with a specific focus on microbiological testing data from growing fields: “Just knowing that a test was positive or negative is not really predictive,” says Dr. Stasiewicz. “It’s much more useful to find out what else about that sample could help predict the result, such as how the sample was taken, its size, the assay method, or the size of the field. That can be combined with publicly available data such as weather patterns, the presence of migratory birds, or a specific wind pattern that may be blowing dust in from somewhere else.”

Federated Learning

Getting growers and researchers to share data can be a challenge, a challenge Dr. Stasiewicz is certainly familiar with. “Nobody is going to share with me, as an academic, a bunch of data,” he says. “Even if it’s not clear what the risk is, if you can’t define a benefit, it’s not worth doing it. If we want to show a path to share food safety information in a non-competitive and non-risky way, we need to find a way to provide more value than the standard root cause analysis.”

One way to lower the perceived risk of sharing data is to remove personally identifying information: “We don’t necessarily need a firm name, a facility location, and a sample date. What we need is the relationships: knowing, for example, that two samples came from the same facility,” says Dr. Stasiewicz.

Another method would be not to require data sharing in the first place. This approach is called federated learning. Bas van der Velden, PhD, head of data science at Wageningen Food Safety Research (WFSR), a research organization based in Utrecht, Netherlands, says, “In the
traditional model, you collect data in a centralized place and use it to train the algorithm. In federated learning, it’s the algorithm that goes to the data stations—which can be a computer, a smartphone, or a server—but, instead of coming back with the data, it just takes the optimized model back. The data never leaves its original location.”

Through this model, WFSR and additional partner companies and research institutions are contributing to an EU-funded project called Extreme Food Risk Analytics (EFRA). The organization’s goal is to develop AI-powered food risk prevention tools using what it calls “extreme data mining.”

Dr. van der Velden explains that the next phase of the project will be to take this model into a real food production environment by working with a large European poultry producer as a use case. “We plan to apply the federated learning approach to train the AI tool with all sorts of internal and external data. A possible use case could be an early warning system that tells you there’s a pattern indicative of microbiological hazard in the short or long term,” he says.

Another crucial aspect of food safety that WFSR is working on, and one that machine learning normally lacks, is a concept called “explainability,” adds Dr. van der Velden. “If you simply say to a farmer not to harvest or not to irrigate today because the algorithm says so, you likely won’t have a successful adaptation. Explainable AI tells why a certain action matters in a language that is tailored to each user, whether it’s policymakers, farmers, researchers, or average citizens,” he adds.

Connecting Information

One type of AI that makes massive use of public information is a model developed by Agroknow, a data and analytics company based in Athens, Greece. The company uses AI technology to collect public food safety data, such as product recalls, border rejections, or facility inspections, and combine it with the internal information of food companies. “Part of our work is to discover announcements hidden in the websites of public authorities around the world and translate them into English,” says Nikos Manouselis, CEO of Agroknow. “When the municipality of Athens inspects a food facility in the region and discovers an issue, they announce it in Greek on their website. Similarly, the FDA publishes its most important announcements in one or two pages, but there are also other pages that nobody looks at.”

Once all of this public data is mined, Agroknow uses AI to connect pieces of information that, though seemingly unrelated, likely refer to the same event: “There may be a news article about five people who got sick from Salmonella after consuming a chicken product in Crete, and a public announcement about a recall of the same product, area, and days, where the serotype is specified. The algorithm would match them and provide a complete description of the event, assigning a reliability score,” says Manouselis.

When all this data is analyzed and harmonized with the use of AI, it gives food companies an accurate idea of the current risks in the supply chain. When their internal data, such as results of inspections, audits, and lab tests, is added, the picture is complete.

Manouselis says that this information can be used to assess the risk related to ingredients or suppliers almost in real time. “If there’s a spike in contaminations of ethylene oxide in sesame seeds and it’s one of my ingredients, I will know I have to test more. If one of my suppliers or other suppliers in the same area were involved in food safety or food fraud incidents, I will source from a different region.”

The most interesting and impactful use of this model, however, is to anticipate trends to better allocate testing and auditing resources, which is especially important for large food companies with extensive supply chains. “When we were in the middle of the ethylene oxide crisis, everyone was testing much more. At some point, our forecasting models showed that the risk was decreasing. For our clients, that was a signal that they could start testing less for ethylene oxide treatment and redirect resources to other areas.”

Right now, the accuracy score of Agroknow’s typical forecasting model ranges between 80% and 95%. But for Manouselis, even a lower level could be useful: “We’re not going to keep it locked up until it reaches 100%. We prefer to put it in the hands of our clients and let them decide if it is useful or not; very often they tell us that even 40% would be enough for them to make better decisions.”

Manouselis cautions that an important part of making AI tools useful and accessible is to demystify them: “AI is not black magic; it’s a scientific model,” he says. “You train it with data, it gives back results; you validate these results and improve the model with more data. It’s a constant cycle.”

Tolu is a freelance writer based in Barcelona, Spain. Reach him at andrea@andreatolu.com.

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