A new wax coating technology for produce could provide enhanced protection against foodborne pathogens, according to new research publishd in Current Research in Food Science.

The idea was the brainstorm of Mustafa Akbulut, PhD, a professor in the department of chemical engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, who teamed Luis Cisneros-Zevallos, PhD, a professor in the department of horticultural sciences at the same institution, to design longer-lasting and bacteria-free produce.

“Our collaborative research group combining cutting-edge engineering, food science, and horticulture science is actively engaged in developing new ideas to address issues related to food safety and shelf life,” Dr. Akbulut tells Food Quality & Safety. “In this work, we want to improve the wax that is already applied to many fruits and vegetables in order to enhance their cosmetics and reduce evaporative losses.”

Since a wax coating is already applied to produce, the team looked for a way to make food waxes more functional and beneficial to maximize their potential. “We wanted to create food waxes that have active and passive protection mechanisms against foodborne pathogens and spoilage microorganisms,” Dr. Akbulut says.

The need for this technology has several elements. First, food spoilage is an enormous burden to national economies worldwide. Even increasing the shelf-life of produce by one day can account for huge sums. This is important for sustainability and minimizing waste.

“Additionally, most food industry processes rely on sanitizers in the facility,” Dr. Akbulut says. “Usually, there is no protection after the food commodity leaves the facility. For instance, during transportation and display on grocery shelves, there are ample opportunities for bacterial contamination. At this point, let us imagine multiple people touching and selecting a food commodity from display shelves. Having a strategy to actively protect the food commodity even after it is sanitized and removed from the facility is extremely important.”

The new wax coating technology uses nano-encapsulated essential oils that are evenly distributed in food-grade wax. “The key is to design encapsulation systems that are compatible with the wax materials and can gradually release their contents,” Dr. Akbulut adds. “This method can extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables by providing a sustained release of bioactive compounds.”

To date, the team have tested the coating against E. coli O157:H7 and S. aureus, demonstrating the product’s effectiveness against common contamination risks.

“It is a conformal coating,” he says. “It can be used for any produce as long as the produce is not very fragile or delicate. It can be commonly applied to many fruits and vegetables, including apples, stone fruits, citrus fruits, cucumbers, bell peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes. These are the starting products. Obviously, commodities more frequent association with foodborne outbreaks can benefit more from this technology.”

He believes that utilizing smarter protective wax coatings can directly translate to performance advantages in the marketplace and is a game changer for the produce industry because it can provide continuous protection of the food commodity even after it leaves the packing/grading facility; growers are already applying wax, so adding functional additives allows them to get additional benefits without major changes to operations; and, the produce will last longer.

The next steps for this technology are to apply it at a production scale to identify and resolve any scaling up issues in translating from lab bench prototypes to commercial packing line implementation. “Our eventual hope is to see this technology broadly implemented across a wide variety of fresh produce,” Dr. Akbulut says. “This would make the produce supply safer while extending shelf life to support sustainability efforts on a global scale by reducing food waste.”

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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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FDA, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state and local partners, is investigating a multistate outbreak of Salmonella Oranienburg infections linked to whole, fresh onions. To date, the outbreak has resulted in 652 illnesses, 129 hospitalizations, and no deaths, and spans 37 states.

FDA’s traceback investigation is ongoing but has identified ProSource Inc. (also known as ProSource Produce, LLC) of Hailey, Idaho, and Keeler Family Farms of Deming, New Mexico, as suppliers of potentially contaminated whole, fresh onions imported from the state of Chihuahua, Mexico.

ProSource Produce LLC has agreed to voluntarily recall red, yellow, and white onions imported from the area with import dates from July 1 through August 27, 2021. Descriptors of these onion types include, but are not limited to, jumbo, colossal, medium, and sweet onions. FDA’s traceback investigation identified Keeler Family Farms as an additional common supplier of onions from Chihuahua, Mexico for many of the restaurants where sick people reported eating. When FDA met with the firm, the firm agreed to voluntarily recall all red, yellow, and white onions imported from Chihuahua from July 1 through August 31, 2021.

Illness subclusters investigated in this outbreak are currently associated with restaurants and food service locations. The investigation is ongoing to determine the source of contamination and whether additional products or firms are linked to illness. FDA is also working to determine whether these onions were available to consumers through grocery stores.

Investigation Background

Epidemiological data collected by investigators from the CDC and state and local partners identified 20 illness clusters at restaurants where onions were served. Information from these clusters shows that many ill people ate raw onions. Investigators worked to identify a common food item eaten by all of the sick people in an effort to identify the source of the outbreak.

State officials collected food items from some of the restaurants where sick people ate. The outbreak strain of Salmonella Oranienburg was found in a sample taken from a takeout condiment cup containing cilantro and lime. The sick person reported that the condiment container also contained onions, but none were left in the cup when it was tested. FDA’s traceback investigation identified ProSource Inc. as a common supplier for many of the restaurants that sick people reported eating at, including the restaurant where the sample from the condiment cup containing cilantro, lime, and onions, was collected.

FDA continues to conduct its traceback investigation to determine whether additional products or suppliers have been affected. Additional information will be provided as it becomes available.

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Low-income residents are at a greater risk than residents in high-income communities of contracting foodborne illness, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Houston. The study, published last month in the Journal of Food Protection, examined the safety and quality of loose-leaf romaine lettuce accessible to low-income populations living in Houston, Texas.

Sujata Sirsat, PhD, an associate professor at the University of Houston’s Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management in Texas and lead author of the study, tells Food Quality & Safety that this was a subject she wanted to explore because of the nutritional disparities she’s seen in low-income neighborhoods. “This is fundamentally characterized by lack of access to fresh, nutritious, and healthful foods,” she says. “As we have more federal and state programs addressing this need, our research question was: Is the produce accessible to low-income communities safe and of high quality from a microbial standpoint?”

The researchers purchased fresh greens from five different retailers in both low- and high-income socioeconomic status areas over a six-month period. The samples underwent reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction testing for pathogen contamination. The investigators found a disparity between the microbial quality and safety of the produce accessible to low-income communities and those collected from the high-income areas.

While both communities saw positive results for Staphylococcus aureus—38% of samples in high-income areas tested positive for the pathogen and 87% tested positive in those collected from low-income areas—no other pathogens were found in the produce sampled in the high-income areas. However, greens collected from the low-income areas tested positive for E. coli O157:H7 (4%), Salmonella spp. (53%), and Listeria monocytogenes (13%).

The research also showed that romaine lettuce in low-income communities had higher levels of spoilage microorganisms, fecal contaminants, and pathogens.

“It’s a big, big problem,” Dr. Sirsat says. “We shouldn’t see this type of empirical evidence.”

Though the study did not identify why the disparity exists, Dr. Sirsat theorizes it could be because of time and temperature abuse of produce; potential cross contamination at various stages in the supply chain; or challenges and differences in the supply chain contributing to contamination.

“There is no quick fix to this problem. Further studies will be needed to identify and address the issue or issues at its root,” she adds. “Investing in fresh produce is critical to the long-term health of communities. We need to be able to investigate the supply chain in depth to be able to identify what is happening, from farm to fork.”

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Over the past three years, CDC has reported approximately 6,000 domestically-acquired cases of cyclosporiasis in the U.S., and the agency believes this number is lower than the actual amount of people infected. The first known contamination in U.S. produce appeared in 2018, with the most famous outbreak occurring in McDonald’s salads that same year. In 2021, there have been 208 reported illnesses, resulting in 21 hospitalizations and no deaths.

In response to this growing problem, FDA unveiled a new plan earlier this month creating a task force to improve prevention, enhance response activities, and fill knowledge gaps to help prevent Cyclospora contamination in food.

Led by multidisciplinary experts across FDA and CDC, the task force’s goal is to decrease the public health burden of foodborne illness caused by Cyclospora in produce.

“In the area of prevention, the new action plan highlights how we’re addressing this food safety issue through the development and delivery of prevention-focused education materials and outreach to stakeholders,” Frank Yiannas, FDA’s deputy commissioner for food policy and response, said in a statement. “We’re also working with industry to encourage the development of rapid test kits to specifically detect Cyclospora to better facilitate industry testing and root cause analysis activities.”

In addition, FDA plans to partner with others in the industry to find ways to improve control over Cyclospora in the environment and on farms, as well as collaborate with CDC to better understand the case distribution of cyclosporiasis across the U.S. and to advance genotyping methods in clinical, food, and environmental samples.

When it comes to improving response, FDA will expand lab capacity to sample and test for the parasite, providing a greater capacity to investigate outbreak events.

“The FDA is also developing a new investigational tool to help guide assessments of farms potentially implicated in a Cyclospora outbreak to determine potential sources and routes of contamination,” Yiannas said.

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According to a new study, streams of water carrying sound and microscopic air bubbles can clean microbial contaminants from spinach leaves more effectively than current washing methods.

Salad and leafy green vegetables may be contaminated with harmful bacteria during growing, harvesting, preparation, and retail, potentially leading to outbreaks of foodborne illness. Because there is no cooking process to reduce the microbial load in fresh salads, washing by the supplier and the consumer is critical. Washing with soap, detergent bleach, or other disinfectants is not recommended, and the crevices in the leaf surface means washing with plain water may leave an infectious dose on the leaf. Even if chemicals are used, they may not penetrate the crevices.

Researchers used acoustic water streams to clean spinach leaves directly sourced from the field crop and compared the results with leaves rinsed in plain water at the same velocity. The results showed that the microbial load on samples cleaned with the acoustic streams for two minutes was significantly lower six days after cleaning than on those treated without the added sound and bubbles. The acoustic cleaning also caused no further damage to the leaves.

Timothy Leighton, a professor of ultrasonics and underwater acoustics at the University of Southampton in the U.K., invented the technology and led the research. “Our streams of water carry microscopic bubbles and acoustic waves down to the leaf,” he says. “There, the sound field sets up echoes at the surface of the leaves, and within the leaf crevices, that attract the bubbles towards the leaf and into the crevices. The sound field also causes the walls of the bubbles to ripple very quickly, turning each bubble into a microscopic ‘scrubbing’ machine. The rippling bubble wall causes strong currents to move in the water around the bubble, and sweep the microbes off the leaf. The bacteria, biofilms, and the bubbles themselves are then rinsed off the leaf, leaving it clean and free of residues.”

The report was published in the journal Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology. As well as reducing outbreaks of foodborne illness, the findings could reduce food waste and have implications for the growing threat of anti-microbial resistance.

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Last week, Texas experienced a rare winter storm that caused record-low temperatures, and the state’s infrastructure failed in many areas as millions went without power, heat, and water for days.

The extreme cold weather also adversely impacted agriculture and the food supply chain, as power and water outages resulted in many farms unable to power machinery and provide water needed to keep farms running smoothly and productively. Ranchers were faced with the challenge of keeping livestock warm, nourished, and alive.

Sid Miller, the state’s agriculture commissioner, noted that many farmers and ranchers across Texas experienced devastating effects from the cold weather on their livestock, feed, and agriculture products, and issued a red alert regarding the state’s agriculture.

“I’m getting calls from farmers and ranchers across the state reporting that the interruptions in electricity and natural gas are having a devastating effect on their operations,” he said in a statement.

Bryan Quoc Le, PhD, a food scientist and food industry consultant based in Washington state, notes that one issue that has emerged with the Texas storm is the loss of power for pasteurization equipment, with dairy processors pouring millions of dollars’ worth of milk down the drain, as they were unable to get their product pasteurized.

In fact, Commissioner Miller confirmed more than $8 million worth of milk was being poured down drains every day in the first few days of the outages, causing empty shelves at grocery stores and food supply chain problems “like we’ve never seen before, even with COVID-19,” he said.

“Cheese producers will also be affected as the supply of fresh milk drops off and prices soar for local and regional milk,” Dr. Le tells Food Quality & Safety. “The freeze has also impacted the citrus and vegetable producers in the Rio Grande Valley, damaging hundreds of thousands of tons of grapefruit, orange, cilantro, kale, and dill crops.”

The Texan agricultural sector was already hit hard by the pandemic, and these economic losses will only continue to escalate the plight of farmers and producers in the area. “Poultry and meat producers have had to suspend operations due to loss of power, which will have significant downstream effects on the availability of chicken, eggs, and meat products in the state,” Dr. Le says. “Texas ranchers and chicken farmers have had to scramble to keep their animals alive, with young calves and chicks freezing to death due to the lack of power. Watering ponds have frozen over, and farmers have had to work around the clock to break up ice and find alternative sources of drinking water.”

Transportation in the state has also been impacted due to the road conditions brought on by the freeze, resulting in fresh produce and food suppliers being unable to bring their products to grocery outlets and restaurants. As a result, perishable food had to be thrown away as it expired.

“We will be seeing a loss of Texan produce and animal products around the country, potentially kicking up the prices of citrus, vegetables, poultry, meat, cheese, and dairy for weeks to come and the loss of agricultural productivity in the region in the long term,” Dr. Le adds.

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The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) is implementing temporary import measures aimed at preventing contaminated romaine from entering the Canadian marketplace. From 2016 to 2019, romaine lettuce from California was linked to outbreaks of E. coli illnesses in the U.S. and Canada. Food safety investigations by Canadian and U.S. authorities identified the Salinas Valley growing region as a recurring source of the outbreaks.

Effective October 7, 2020, the CFIA is requiring importers to either provide proof that romaine lettuce destined for import into Canada does not originate from counties in the Salinas Valley, or provide an official certificate of analysis from an accredited laboratory confirming that the lettuce has below-detectable levels of E. coli.

The Salinas region, as defined by the United Fresh Produce Association and the Produce Marketing Association Romaine Taskforce Report [PDF], includes the California counties of Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, San Benito, and Monterey.

CFIA is working closely and collaboratively with FDA to identify and respond to any potential outbreaks, and continues to put in place effective preventive controls. The testing applies to romaine lettuce as well as mixed salads containing romaine, and will be required until December 31, 2020.

The program adds an extra layer of controls to the food safety measures in place under the Safe Food for Canadians Regulations (SFCR). On January 15, 2020, SFCR requirements came into force for most businesses in the fresh fruits or vegetables (FFV) sector that import, export or engage in interprovincial trade.

Under the SFCR, FFV businesses are required to obtain a Safe Food for Canadians license and maintain:

• Preventive controls that address food safety hazards;
• Preventive control plans that document risks to food and how they are addressed; and
• Traceability documentation that tracks the movement of food one step forward and one step back in the supply chain.

Additional Safeguards for Romaine Lettuce

Canada maintains specific import requirements to minimize potential hazards associated with romaine. For example, the importation of leafy greens from California is limited to products supplied by certified members of the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement (LGMA). LGMA certified members must adhere to food safety requirements subject to regular audits by the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

In addition, the CFIA has a regular monitoring program for E. coli O157:H7 in fresh vegetables and is also testing 1,000 more samples of lettuce and products containing lettuce per year.

For more information, read the CFIA’s guidance Import requirements for romaine lettuce from the United States.

Quick Facts

• The CFIA plays a critical role in safeguarding a healthy food supply system, ensuring the foods Canadians eat are safe and facilitating the trade of food and food products internationally.
• More than 50,000 shipments of romaine lettuce or salad mixes containing romaine lettuce were imported into Canada from June 2019 to July 2020.
• Romaine is associated with elevated food safety risks. In Canada, there have been seven documented outbreaks of illnesses associated with romaine lettuce, and 16 recalls of romaine lettuce or products containing romaine lettuce due to E. coli O157:H7 from 2010 to 2019.
• Under this new requirement, romaine from Salinas must be tested in a laboratory accredited by the Standards Council of Canada, the Canadian Association for Laboratory Accreditation, or another accreditation body that is a signatory to the International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation Mutual Recognition Agreement.

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Unlike many foods, fresh produce such as leafy greens doesn’t have a kill step. “No heat or chemical treatment can eliminate microorganisms that might cross-contaminate fruits or vegetables,” says Bob Whitaker, PhD, chief science officer, Produce Marketing Association of Newark, Del., which provides connections and industry solutions to members of the fresh produce and floral industries. This means that rigorous food safety measures must be in place at every point in their supply chain.

Despite best efforts, however, human pathogens can get into the nooks and crannies of fresh produce where wash water can’t reach. Assuring the safety of fresh produce depends on preventing contamination throughout the produce supply chain, from farm to fork. “This can be a challenging task given that most fresh produce is grown outdoors, where it may be exposed to environmental contaminants in the soil, air, water, and wind,” says Jim Gorny, PhD, senior science advisor for produce safety, FDA Center for Food Safety & Applied Nutrition, College Park, Md. “Therefore, it’s essential to ensure that agricultural inputs such as agricultural water and soil amendments are as free of human pathogens as possible and that food contact surfaces that touch fresh produce, such as hands and conveyor belts, don’t become a means of produce contamination.”

Challenges in Investigating Fresh Produce Outbreaks

Considering that about a billion servings of fresh produce are consumed daily, the number of foodborne illness outbreaks (correlated with the rate of contamination) is remarkably low, says Jennifer McEntire, PhD, vice president of food safety and technology, United Fresh Produce Association, a Washington, D.C.-based national trade association representing the fresh produce supply chain. According to CDC, fresh produce accounted for 17 percent of outbreaks from 2008 to 2015, causing about 1,200 illnesses per year.

But the year 2018 challenged the U.S. food industry to reconsider whether produce safety practices are indeed reasonably effective at preventing a single contamination event from occurring when two E. coli outbreaks and a Cyclospora outbreak in the U.S. were traced to romaine lettuce and were reported in April, July, and November, respectively.

Outbreaks often perplex federal health officials as to how and why they originated because during an outbreak investigation, they respond to a failure in food safety measures somewhere within a large number of potential points between the farm and consumer. “At many points in the supply chain, the food from several sources could mix, which makes the traceback investigation far more complex,” Dr. Gorny says.

“Even if the traceback investigation leads to a common food source or several potential sources, it’s possible that harvesting or processing may have ceased. In the case of perishable commodities, such as leafy greens, there may not be any product left in the marketplace or in consumers’ homes to test,” Dr. Gorny continues. “Therefore, by the time an epidemiologist identifies a potential food source, many of these products have passed their expiration dates and are no longer available, making it much more difficult for investigators to collect the necessary information to help identify a source.”

To further complicate matters, investigators might have to cover hundreds of acres of farmland or thousands of square feet in a processing facility. When multiple farms are potentially involved, the investigation area could be spread over many miles. “Essentially, investigators are looking for invisible bacteria, much like looking for a needle in a haystack,” Dr. Gorny says.

Focusing on Traceability

Following the large leafy green multistate outbreaks of the mid and late 2000s in the U.S., the produce industry voluntarily worked to develop the Produce Traceability Initiative to develop a standardized industry approach to enhance the speed and efficiency of traceability systems for the future. “This voluntary approach is a great start because it allows the industry to align the way it collects and uses data based on Global Standards One (GS1) US, which sets standards for global commerce; it works toward case-level traceability,” says Ben Miller, PhD, MPH, senior director of food safety, The Acheson Group, a global food safety consulting group in Northfield, Minn.

FDA strongly encourages the leafy greens industry to adopt traceability best practices and state-of-the-art technology. This would ensure quick and easy access to key data elements from farm to fork when leafy greens are involved in a potential recall or outbreak. “Leafy greens are a highly perishable commodity; traceability information should facilitate the rapid tracking of involved product throughout the entire supply chain to expedite its removal from commerce, prevent additional consumer exposures, and properly focus any recall actions,” Dr. Gorny says.

A key element that would assist tracing efforts during an outbreak is the ability to identify specific farms or ranches that contribute to production lots, especially when the product has been comingled. While it’s important to identify where a product was grown and not simply the location of the business entity that shipped or processed it, it is equally important to be able to determine which specific farm(s) and growing region(s) are responsible for supplying the contaminated product. “This information is crucial to developing accurate public health messaging to protect the public from exposure and empower consumers to take appropriate actions,” Dr. Gorny adds.

United Fresh Produce Association and Produce Marketing Association, with input from the Romaine Task Force, are leading an initiative to include voluntary labeling on all romaine lettuce packaging that identifies its origin and a means to determine its harvest date. “Having this information will improve our ability to provide more targeted information to consumers during an outbreak,” Dr. Gorny says. “Significant progress has been made by the lettuce and leafy greens industry to assure moving forward that the growing region is clearly and uniformly labeled on romaine lettuce products.”

Without the ability to identify the growing region or specific suppliers of suspected shipments, public messaging by FDA and other public health partners during recalls or outbreaks is broad out of necessity, possibly implicating farms and growing regions that aren’t responsible for the contamination. “If supplier data are maintained when a product is comingled, it is easier to narrow the number of suspected shipments and suppliers of the contaminated product once it has been processed,” Dr. Gorny says.

But Dr. Miller doesn’t foresee improvements in supply chain traceability unless there’s a regulatory requirement. “Distributors and retailers don’t have an immediate financial reason to maintain case-level traceability, so it’s likely that the FDA will need to address this through authority granted under its Food Safety Modernization Act [FSMA] of 2011 before we see full supply chain traceability,” he says. “Essentially, supply chain traceability is no longer a technology problem; rather it’s a political and policy problem.”

To improve the traceability process, Dr. Miller believes that blockchain technology holds promise but will require operational changes in the supply before it’s fully effective. “Blockchain technology creates the ability to accurately associate transactional data across the supply chain. Companies such as distributors would have to make operational changes that would capture case-level data as shipments are received, pallets are broken down, and orders are filled for outgoing shipments,” he says. “But without operational changes like these, more integrated data systems will continue to capture data that lack the detail and granularity that public health investigators need to rapidly trace an outbreak and possibly prevent ongoing illnesses.”

Eyeing Water Safety

In addition to efforts to make it easier to identify sources of foodborne illness outbreaks, research is being conducted on how to prevent contamination from occurring in the first place. One aspect that is currently being studied is ensuring that water sources that come into contact with leafy greens are safe.

Lettuce producer and manufacturer Fresh Express formed a panel of independent scientific, production, and policy experts in November 2018 to make recommendations for new or improved ways to prevent Cyclospora outbreaks. Michael T. Osterholm, PhD, MPH, chair of the Fresh Express Blue-Ribbon Panel on Prevention of Cyclospora Outbreaks, who is also a regents professor, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, says leafy greens outbreaks differ from other types of foodborne illness outbreaks because humans must play an essential role given that Cyclospora requires a human host to complete its lifecycle. The panel was formed as a result of 2018 Cyclospora outbreaks involving fresh produce grown and harvested in the U.S.

Cyclospora outbreaks since the 1990s have had high attack rates. “This suggests that contamination doesn’t occur sporadically, and that there’s a much more widely disseminated source for the parasite,” Dr. Osterholm says.

The parasite must live seven to 14 days outside of the human body to mature and be capable of infecting other humans. “If a parasite is excreted in a human stool, for example, it requires that time period to pass before it becomes infectious,” he says.

Given this information, the panel is looking to determine potential sources and preventive controls, including if water can spread Cyclospora. Dr. Osterholm surmises that water used for irrigation or spraying could be the culprit. Perhaps water could become contaminated from septic systems leaking into water sources.

“We need to make sure that there’s no intentional or unintentional release of human fecal material into waterways,” Dr. Osterholm says. “A number of actions could be implemented to reduce the potential for Cyclospora to enter water and to prevent water that contains the parasite from being used on plants. Because the parasite is highly resistant to chlorination, the chemical can’t be used to help solve the problem.”

On April 19, the California Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement (LGMA) Board adopted more stringent requirements designed to reduce risks related to water used in growing leafy greens. The updates include specific directives such as no longer allowing the use of untreated surface water for overhead irrigation of leafy greens prior to harvesting, says April Ward, MSc, communications director, California LGMA, Sacramento, Calif.

The new standards are in direct response to FDA investigations of last year’s E. coli outbreak involving romaine lettuce. Clues pointed to irrigation water from sources such as canals and reservoirs as a possible cause.

California LGMA devised the new water metrics by working closely with Western Growers, who coordinated a working group, and Arizona LGMA. The organizations looked at water sources and how they’re being used in production. “It’s unlikely that water from deep wells could be contaminated with human pathogens because the Earth provides an effective filtration process to eliminate bacteria,” says Dr. Whitaker. “Well water can therefore be used without fear of cross-contamination, provided the delivery system is well maintained and inspected.

“But surface waters such as ponds or canals are more likely to be impacted by runoff from pasture lands or animal operations, wild animals, wind-blown dust, or even septic systems—making it necessary that they’re evaluated and perhaps treated with disinfectants to manage potential pathogen contamination,” Dr. Whitaker continues.

“LGMA’s program has always required growers to test their water because it can carry pathogens,” Ward says. “But the new requirements include additional safeguards that ensure farmers categorize the water source and consider how and when water is applied to a crop; conduct testing to ensure water is safe for the intended use; and sanitize water if necessary.”

The new metrics will become part of mandatory government audits that comprise the LGMA’s food safety system. The LGMA will also begin an education and outreach effort to ensure that all members of the leafy greens community understand how to comply with the new standards, Ward says.

Other Efforts to Ensure Safety

Many other groups and organizations are also committed to improving leafy green safety. The CEOs of the United Fresh Produce Association and the Produce Marketing Association are co-leading a Romaine Task Force that includes a diverse group of industry thought leaders, FDA, CDC, trade groups, public interest groups, and academic scientists throughout the supply chain.

Following the 2018 outbreaks involving romaine, the task force is tackling key issues around produce labeling to allow consumers to know where their romaine was grown, permit supply chain-wide traceability, explore science-related issues around agricultural water and root cause analysis, and identify and prioritize improvements in the investigative process, Dr. Miller says.

“We expect to conclude our work this year and then reach across the entire supply chain to provide educational opportunities to ease the implementation of changes that will be recommended or create awareness around any new tools in development,” Dr. Whitaker says.

The Center for Produce Safety (CPS), which provides the produce industry with information on enhancing the safety of fresh fruits and vegetables, has prioritized produce safety research (including but not limited to leafy greens) for more than a decade. Nearly 150 research programs have been funded thus far, with an investment of nearly $26 million. Among the research priorities, CPS is currently focused on industry issues involving animal feeding operations and agricultural water, Dr. Whitaker says.

The Acheson Group works closely with food producers at every level of the supply chain and determines how risk that isn’t adequately controlled upstream in the supply chain can carry through to the consumer. “When working with companies that grow, harvest, and process leafy greens, we look at the areas of greatest risk relative to food safety using FSMA’s regulations as a guide,” says Peyman Fatemi, PhD, vice president, Scientific Affairs, The Acheson Group, Big Fork, Mont. “FSMA regulations, when fully implemented, will go a significant distance in developing programs that will prevent microbial contamination in leafy greens.”

The Acheson Group is also working to incorporate the most current science to guide its recommendations. “Prior to the romaine outbreaks of 2018, the industry had not been treating its overhead irrigation water, which was drawn directly from irrigation canals,” Dr. Fatemi says. “There are still simple and logical steps, such as understanding the use and management of nearby land, that the industry can use to minimize the contamination of leafy greens.”

“The key is to perform a hazard analysis and then develop preventive controls to manage those risks,” Dr. Whitaker concludes. “And when contamination is discovered, it is equally important to perform a root cause analysis to identify why the contamination occurred and how it can be prevented in the future.”

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They get no respect. Tomatoes, lemons, and other fruit and produce that may be undersized, a bit off-color, or have the odd bump or two. But are they really misfits or ugly if they offer the same nutrition, safety, smell, and taste but cost 30 percent less than their pretty relatives?

That’s a question grocers and consumers alike are asking as they test this new food option. Ugly produce typically is thrown out, composted at the farm, or sold to wholesalers and restaurants that process it until its odd visage is gone. Consumers see ugly produce as a way to save money. Grocers see it as a way to make fresh fruit affordable to those who previously couldn’t buy it, and help their company be a good corporate citizen, even join the zero food waste movement.

Indeed, market researcher Mintel of Chicago cited eliminating food waste as one of six key global food and drink trends for 2017. It includes using formerly ignored items like misfit produce. Both are part of a broader focus on sustainability. Joining Mintel, the Food & Agriculture Products Center, Stillwater, Okla., put using ugly produce to cut food waste in its top 10 food trends for 2017.

“More retailers, restaurants, and philanthropic organizations are addressing the sheer amount of food and drink that is wasted around the world, which is changing consumer perceptions,” Mintel notes. “In 2017, the stigma associated with imperfect produce will begin to fade, more products will make use of ingredients that would have otherwise gone to waste, such as fruit snacks made from ‘ugly’ fruit and mayonnaise made from the liquid from packaged chickpeas, and food waste will be repurposed in new ways, such as power sources.”

Ugly or pretty, produce still has to be safe for it to meet food safety standards so it can be sold to consumers, says Jennifer McEntire, vice president of food safety and technology at United Fresh Produce Association, Washington, D.C.

“The ugly fruit movement is about visual appearance, not food safety,” she says. “Any product that is potentially unsafe can’t be sold.”

The USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service administers the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act, which specifies quality and grades fruit and vegetables to assure there is a standard for the produce and its price. That includes the size of tomatoes, so smaller tomatoes that still look pretty are typically resold to wholesalers, restaurants, or even as ugly fruit.

McEntire says her organization and the USDA hold joint inspection training programs that last a week and include hands-on training in assessing color and size, plus a laboratory component on how to evaluate produce. The programs are for anyone from the companies selling tomatoes to those purchasing them.

Ugly Lovers Emerge

An estimated 40 percent of food grown in this country ends up in the garbage, according to Natural Resources Defense Council figures cited by the ThinkProgress news website. American consumers toss out about 25 percent of the food they buy. The publication says a lot of waste also happens between farms and grocery stores, which impose sometimes arbitrary cosmetic standards on produce, previously rendering it fit for the dumpster. But that’s changing.

The effort to save and use the wallflower produce is thought to have taken off in Europe around 2014, notably by French retailer Intermarché, after the European Union declared 2014 to be the Year Against Food Waste. Intermarché, France’s third-largest supermarket, made the initiative viral, launching an “inglorious fruits and vegetables” campaign to attract consumers to ugly fruit, including a YouTube video displaying misshapen fruits and vegetables in a way to make them attractive. Highlights include the grotesque apple, the ugly carrot, and the unfortunate clementine.

Advocates for ugly produce emerged in the past couple years as well in the U.S., including Californian Jordan Figueiredo. He decided to use social medial to spread love for disfigured produce and runs the website EndFoodWaste.org and the Twitter handle @UglyFruitAndVeg, which now has 81,500 followers. It also offers recipes and tips on how to use the cast-offs.

But the bigger goal for his work and others embracing ugly fruit was to convince Walmart, Whole Foods, and other grocers to sell ugly fruits and vegetables. Doug Rauch, former president at Trader Joe’s, also took up the charge and set up the Daily Table grocer in a poorer Boston neighborhood called Dorchester to sell, among other things, blemished food.

The ugly produce movement continues to gain followers. For example, Hy-Vee, West Des Moines, Iowa, an employee-owned corporation operating more than 240 retail stores across eight Midwestern states, partnered in January with Robinson Fresh, Eden Prairie, Minn., one of the largest produce companies in the world that offers produce called Misfits.

“The beauty of this program is that the produce tastes the same and is of the same high quality, it just looks different. As the saying goes, ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover.’ The same is true for Misfits fruits and vegetables,” John Griesenbrock, Hy-Vee’s vice president of produce/HealthMarkets, said in a statement when it announced the program in January 2017. “As a company with several focused environmental efforts, we feel it’s our responsibility to help educate consumers and dispel any misperceptions about produce that is not cosmetically perfect.”

Hy-Vee quotes United Nations estimates that 20 to 40 percent of produce harvested each year is thrown away because it does not meet USDA sizing standards for store shelves. By selling Misfits, Hy-Vee is aligning with the USDA’s goal to reduce food waste by 50 percent by 2030.

“We understand that there is product left in the field because farmers don’t think there’s a market for it,” Hunter Winton, Robinson Fresh general manager, added when the Hy-Vee agreement was announced. “With the Misfits program, farmers have an outlet to sell more produce and customers have an opportunity to save money and help reduce waste.”

Misfits Find Their Niche

Misfits produce is now available in almost all of the more than 240 Hy-Vee grocery stores. The product line has caught on in other regions, including in March at Hannaford Brothers of Scarborough, Maine, a Delhaize America company owned by Ahold Delhaize group of the Netherlands. The company has more than 180 stores in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont, but is starting Hannaford Misfits, in collaboration with Robinson Fresh, initially at 15 Maine stores.

“These aren’t culled products that aren’t otherwise sold in stores,” says Eric Blom, Hannaford spokesman. “We cull products one to four times a day to give bruised or discolored produce to food pantries. We donated 23 million pounds last year.

“Instead, Misfits is specific produce that otherwise wouldn’t be purchased,” he adds. “Supermarkets [typically] wouldn’t purchase fruit and vegetables that are nonstandard such as being misshapen, off-color, or smaller. Now we buy Misfits that are nonstandard and sold in addition to usual fruit.”

Hannaford did run a pilot project for Misfits first in Albany, N.Y., in collaboration with Robinson. The Misfits are sold in various-sized bags. Blom says the grocer has no demographic information yet for purchasers, but others have said millennials are attracted to the concept of reducing food waste and using ugly fruit.

“We were one of the first in the United States to do it,” Blom says, adding that Whole Foods in California also was an early adopter. “We are a company that works hard to reduce food waste. About one third of our 181 stores [already] have zero food waste. And it’s a good option for customers because it costs 30 percent less.”

He says the Misfits have been popular, and the grocer is evaluating and learning more from it before it considers further rolling out the concept in more stores. “We hope [it] is successful and look to potentially expanding it to other stores,” Blom says.

Blom also explains that strict USDA food safety standards still apply.

“We don’t have any concerns about safety,” Blom says. “It has the same nutritional value as its more standard cousins, so the quality and safety are the same.”

Some people favor the standard-shaped products, as the ugly fruit can have scars, a carrot could split into two conjoined carrots, tomatoes may be slightly discolored, or two may be fused together. Others find beauty or even a profit in the cosmetic abnormalities.

The fused tomatoes, which are genetically mutated and known as “whoppers,” are especially popular with food service customers, says Jim Darroch, director of marketing at Backyard Farms, a Madison, Maine, hydroponic tomato grower. That’s because they are larger and easier to process into sandwiches or sauces.

Darroch says 45 percent of the company’s sales are to wholesalers, and 3 to 5 percent of its production has to be destroyed due to safety issues. It’s not selling ugly fruit yet, but Darroch adds Backyard may at some time consider doing so. “People’s tastes are evolving and changing and we are keeping up with it,” he adds.

Community supported agriculture also is making moves with ugly fruit. Ugly CSA is Pittsburgh’s first CSA for funky fruit. It uses the moniker “Delicious is not skin deep.” And The Ugly Apple Café food cart, Madison, Wis., uses local farmers’ overstock produce to minimize waste.

Good Price Leads to Shortages

When Walmart began selling ugly produce in mid-2016 under the “I’m Perfect” label, it found a ready market for low-priced bagged apples in about 300 of its Florida stores, but like even smaller grocers, found it difficult to get a steady supply of the ugly fruits and vegetables, according to CNBC.

While there may be plenty of imperfect apples one week, it may take weeks or months until there’s enough available from the next harvest.

Dana Gunders, a senior scientist in the food and agriculture program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told CNBC at the time, “Selling cosmetically imperfect produce is relatively rare right now. Whole Foods has a pilot program, and there was a California chain, Raley’s, that tried it for a little while but discontinued it.” Raley’s has said it was reorganizing and the person spearheading the program moved on, according to Food Tank. There’s also been concern by grocers that consumers in general will shift to the cheaper produce, but Raley’s found that wasn’t the case.

Ugly produce did get a boost in early 2016 when TV’s “Shark Tank” venture capitalist Robert Herjavec gave $100,000 for a 10 percent share in the ugly produce delivery company Hungry Harvest, Columbia, Md. It sells ugly fruit under the brand “Produce with Purpose,” and soon after the infusion of money it expanded quickly.

In August 2016 the company opened its first Produce in a SNAP site at Baltimore’s Franklin Square elementary school, which is in the middle of a food desert. Hungry Harvest CEO and co-founder Evan Lutz wrote the following in an April 2017 article for CNBC: “We sell 7- to 12-pound bags to residents that don’t otherwise have access to affordable produce, for just $7. We also accept SNAP and EBT, hence ‘SNAP’ in the program’s name.”

He notes the program has since taken off, with over 3,000 bags sold and $30,000 in revenue in the seven months since the program got started. Hungry Harvest plans to expand to two new sites per month.

Hannaford and others are examining early results of ugly produce to gauge customer reactions and whether they can get enough of a supply. But players like Hungry Harvest have found there is demand for such food, especially from people who normally don’t have access to fresh fruit and vegetables. And in the process, the ugly fruit industry hopes to become part of the solution to matching food insecurity with food waste.

Valigra is a writer based in Harrison, Maine. Reach her at lvaligra@gmail.com.

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