It is a pivotal time for nutrition companies across the world as more and more people take aim at making healthy living a priority. As the nutrition and vitamin industry rapidly expands, manufacturers are rushing to keep up with the pace of product demand. Unfortunately, many laboratories and facilities operate in isolation and seldom receive independent technical evaluation to measure their compliance and performance in manufacturing. Increased product demand should never jeopardize high standards for quality and now more than ever, manufacturers must be transparent and consistent in their processes.

So how can nutritional product manufacturers achieve product quality, consistency, and transparency?

In order to achieve this goal, a company must start with the sourcing of high-quality ingredients and continue through the meticulous production and advanced testing of every finished product. Once a company has made the decision to achieve these high standards, having the process, products, laboratories, and scientists certified and accredited by independent, third-party organizations, such as International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and NSF International, is vital to helping customers trust the company’s commitment to quality.

The commitment to quality and achieving the goal of consistency and transparency is by no means a quick or inexpensive endeavor. Those who embark on meeting these goals will need to make significant investment in laboratories, testing equipment, facilities, ingredients, and scientific talent, to ultimately meet the rigorous testing standards and facility compliance audits set by ISO and NSF.

For example, at Herbalife Nutrition, the program begins with the cultivation, collection, and processing of ingredients, then blending them with other ingredients and finally packaging the blended powders into finished package containers. At each factory, raw materials are quarantined upon arrival and sampled for quality control testing. Materials are only released for production after passing a comprehensive set of quality tests. Quality assurance personnel monitor the process by checking critical steps in production by utilizing analytical equipment to ensure product quality and uniformity.

Some examples of the latest analytical technologies and laboratory instrumentation to analyze raw materials and finished products that a nutritional company would make include equipment and instruments such as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy, High Performance Liquid Chromatography, Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry, Inductively Coupled Plasma, Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry, and Next Generation Sequencing for DNA testing.

So why is certification and accreditation important for nutritional companies?

When a company is able to secure ISO 17025 accreditation, it means that the company adheres to strict standards for the technical competency of laboratory scientific personnel, the accuracy of microbiology and chemistry testing methods, and the validation of equipment.

ISO 17025 accreditation also gives the company confidence in its procedures and provides extra assurance to consumers that the company’s laboratory tests are very accurate and reliable. And while this accreditation is not required, companies committed to the goal of quality, consistency, and transparency should seek to achieve the ISO 17025 high standards that will go a long way to create an industry standard on behalf of consumers.

Similarly, the NSF, an accredited, independent third-party certification body, performs regular on-site audits of facilities. NSF conducts tests of federally regulated current Good Manufacturing Practices and certifies that products made at a facility are produced consistently and in accordance with the applicable regulations, ensuring that products continue to meet specifications and label claims.

In summation, companies should begin to adopt the philosophy that they need to operate through a policy of continuous improvements, and laboratory accreditation provides an additional mechanism for independent benchmarking. With ISO accreditation and NSF certification, customers can be confident that a nutrition company’s products and facilities meet international standards for product quality, testing, and safety.

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Chang is vice president of quality assurance and control at Herbalife Nutrition. Reach him at peterch@herbalife.com.

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Tracing back a meal to its source is a humbling moment. More often than not, at least five thousand individuals work behind the scenes in the food and beverage industries and five thousand more are directly involved in the production and logistics processes. Food quality and safety systems have certainly come a long way, and continue to enhance themselves by understanding the local and international food culture first.

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Chipotle Mexican Grill has retained two leading food safety experts, including a critic of the burrito chain’s early response to disease outbreaks last year, as it redoubles its efforts to guard against health scares.

David Acheson, a former official at the U.S. FDA and the USDA, was brought on as an adviser, Chipotle told Reuters.

The company also confirmed it is working with David Theno, a food safety consultant and former Jack in the Box executive who is credited with fixing food safety at the fast-food chain following a deadly E. coli outbreak in the 1990s.

The two are respected among food safety experts, and their involvement may signal an expansion in Chipotle’s reforms. But the scope is not yet clear.

Spokesman Chris Arnold confirmed the consultants were retained last year but would not say when or detail their duties. As recently as early December, Acheson was sharply critical of the company’s initial response to the outbreaks.

In March, the company announced it had hired James Marsden, a former meat science professor at Kansas State University, as executive director of food safety. Arnold said Marsden would have “primary responsibility for our food safety programs.”

Expanding its complement of food safety experts is part of Chipotle’s effort to rebound from a spate of disease outbreaks, including E. coli, Salmonella, and norovirus, last year that crushed sales, repulsed customers, and slashed $6 billion off its market valuation.

Chipotle’s ability to win back diners is vital to reviving sales and is expected to be a key topic at the company’s annual meeting on May 11.

“We have committed to establishing Chipotle as an industry leader in food safety, and we have assembled an extremely capable team to help us achieve that goal,” Arnold told Reuters.

Chipotle declined to make members of the team available for interviews.

“If I had to put together a dream team to fix something, you could do a lot worse,” said Don Schaffner, a food science professor at Rutgers University. But, he added: “I’ve begun to wonder a little bit about too many cooks. Each of those guys is going to have a perspective on what to do to fix the problem.”

Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, said he expected the group’s focus “would likely be more on food safety preventive controls and less on food testing.”

Chipotle’s initial response emphasized testing ingredients for pathogens with the goal of stopping any source of illness from getting into its restaurants. The company touted a testing regime set up by another consultant, Mansour Samadpour, chief executive of IEH Laboratories & Consulting Group.

Acheson criticized the Chipotle for relying too heavily on that one approach. “I’m not a believer that you can test your way to safety,” he told Reuters in early December.

At the time, he said the focus should be on improving food sourcing and handling practices, including how suppliers are approved, “how they are leveraged in terms of training, storing, handling, and preparing of food.”

Arnold said Chipotle continues to work with the IEH testing firm. Its more recent changes have focused on food preparation. For instance, Chipotle said on its latest earnings call that it had started blanching bell peppers in an effort to kill germs.

The chain also has cut some small suppliers. Kenter Canyon Farms said it lost business providing oregano to Chipotle through a third-party distributor.

“When that whole scandal happened with the E. coli, when they revamped their food safety. They cut ties with a lot of growers,” said Mark Lopez, sales director for the farm.

Chipotle also began buying more red onions from Oregon-based River Point Farms, which said it is the country’s largest onion supplier, a source involved in the situation said.

The goal was to make it easier for Chipotle to trace the origins of the products, according to the source, who did not want to be identified. River Point declined to comment.

Chipotle’s Arnold said the chain would continue to support smaller farms, and has committed to spending $10 million to help them meet its standards. But he said the company has noted that it may be difficult for “some of our smaller suppliers to meet our heightened food safety standards.”

Big chains, including Yum Brands Inc., the parent of Taco Bell and KFC, and McDonald’s Corp., tend to work with a small number of large suppliers, which often have more resources and controls.

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A Reuters/Ipsos poll of 1,883 adults living in the U.S., conducted January 15 to 21, finds that 58 percent say they tried to limit sugar in their diets in the previous 30 days. That is higher than the percentage of those who were targeting reductions in their intake of calories, sodium, fats, cholesterol, or carbohydrates. Only 39 percent say they had not tried to cut sugar intake.

Last month, the U.S. government said that Americans should seek to keep their intake of added sugars, which is sugar added during processing or preparation of foods, to less than 10 percent of daily calories, the first time it had recommended a specific limit.

That would translate to a cut of about one-third for the average American, but a significantly higher reduction for teenagers, who eat about 17 percent of their calories in added sugars.

Of the people surveyed, 50 percent say they have tried to cut down on calories, 48 percent sodium, 46 percent for both saturated fats and trans fat/trans fatty acid, 43 percent cholesterol, and 40 percent carbohydrates.

And while the number of people who weren’t planning cuts in calories, sodium, and fats roughly matched those hoping to reduce intake, just 39 percent of respondents say they had no intention of cutting down on sugar.

To be sure, the survey asked people about their attempts to limit sugar, not about their success rate in doing so, and notoriously short-lived New Year’s resolutions may account for some of the responses. There is also no directly comparable poll for previous years.

But the poll results may reflect the impact of the increasing concerns expressed by health advocates about links between high-sugar diets and levels of obesity. This “war on sugar” has grown in scope over the last few years beyond just sodas and candy to packaged foods like cereal and pasta sauce.

Google Trends data show that online search interest in the term “added sugar” is on the rise. It reached the height of its popularity in the U.S. last month, data going back to 2004 show. Searches for cholesterol, sodium, or saturated fat exceeded those for sugar, but their popularity was trending lower or stable. Searches for “is sugar bad” were significantly more popular than the same searches for cholesterol, sodium, and saturated fat.

A spokeswoman for the Sugar Association, which represents U.S. sugar companies and grower-cooperatives, says that limits on sugar are “the low hanging fruit in the fight against obesity,” adding that the real culprit behind obesity has been a rise in calories from things other than sugar since 1970.

Companies have started to offer more low-sugar products to customers with Kellogg promising to cut sugar to 10 grams or less for every 30-gram serving in 90 percent of its cereals by 2020. The Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) says companies have cut sugar and carbohydrates in more than 5,500 products between 2002 and 2013.

“We’re committed to giving consumers more of what they want and need, and less of what they are trying to reduce,” Kris Charles, a Kellogg spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

Unit sales of sugar in stores fell nearly 4 percent last year from 2014, the oldest data provided to the press by Nielsen show, continuing a downward trend since 2011.

Dollar sales declined 17 percent in value between 2011 and 2014, though in 2015 they recovered by 2 percent due to price rises.

Major U.S. sugar company ASR Group, the maker of Domino Sugar and C&H Sugar, declined to comment. Louis Dreyfus Commodities, the global commodities trader that owns cane refiner Imperial Sugar Co., did not respond to requests for comment.

Food companies would be required to include the amount of added sugar as a percentage of recommended daily calorie intake on their “Nutrition Facts” labels, according to a proposal from the U.S. FDA.

While candy maker Mars has said it supports the new dietary guidelines and the move to include “added sugars” on the labels, the GMA has questioned the scientific review behind the FDA’s proposed labeling changes.

Nearly two-thirds of poll respondents say they use those labels at least sometimes when deciding to buy a product.

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Winona LaDuke, a Native American activist of the Ojibwe tribe, has led battles to save her people’s local wild rice. (Photo Credit: Copyright 2015 Carla Capalbo)

Six hundred representatives of native communities around the world recently gathered in Shillong, northeastern India, for Indigenous Terra Madre (ITM), an event that helps forge a global network of indigenous peoples, activists, and their supporters.

The event, under the auspices of Slow Food, takes place every four years. This ITM was held in cooperation with the Indigenous Partnership for Agrobiodiversity and Food Sovereignty (supported by the Christensen Fund) and was hosted by the Indian region of Meghalaya and the North East Slow Food Agrobiodiversity Society. Their individual stories vary but are closely linked.

Focus on Food Sovereignty
Chi Suwichan is a member of the Karen tribe of northern Thailand. His people have lived there for centuries, yet the current Thai government does not recognize them as citizens. Maria Bautista Leon, from the Tzeltal indigenous people of Chiapas, Mexico, and a descendant of the Mayans, is protesting the increase of monoculture and the threat of genetically modified corn in her country. Winona LaDuke, a Native American activist of the Ojibwe tribe, has led battles to save her people’s local wild rice as she fights for tribal land claims.

The focus at ITM is on environmental, biodiversity, food sovereignty, and other sustainability issues linked to these communities’ way of life, many of which are increasingly under threat. Members of 140 tribes from 58 countries on five continents attended the five-day event. Open meetings were arranged by themes, including: learning about food systems from matriarchal societies; building bridges between the private sector and indigenous communities; oral history; pastoralists and their challenges; and the future of food.

Prince Charles, who has long been a champion of these kinds of issues, sent a video message for the inauguration. “In our modern world, we are totally disconnected from indigenous knowledge,” he said. “The essential unity of things as reflected in nature has become dangerously fragmented. The modern world has shifted away from the holistic indigenous cosmology of seeing ourselves within nature to us standing apart from it. We must look after the earth and help it maintain its health and balance.” He suggests we listen to indigenous wisdom for the guidance we need to live in harmony with our planet.

Uniting Voices for Change
Carlo Petrini, who founded Slow Food 30 years ago in Italy and later created Terra Madre to bring together food-making communities from all corners of the globe, also spoke at the meeting. “Our planet is suffering from the greed of those who want to steal its resources,” he began. “We hope the Climate Change conference in Paris will make constructive decisions about this disaster. Our food has lost its value. It has been turned into a commodity to be paid as little as possible for. The truth is that 500 million small household food communities feed 70 percent of the world, yet they are treated the worst of all. The large multinationals claim ownership of their seeds and promote intensive, genetically modified farming and monocultures that are destroying the lives of these indigenous food-producing communities. There can be no sustainability if we don’t change this model.”

With most delegates attending in their native dress, the get-together was colorful, musical and emotional. At large communal meals hosted by local chefs (the most memorable was an invitation to dinner for everyone at the Shillong Sikh’s Gurdwara temple), there was plenty of time for people to share stories, problems and solutions.

“My people’s history was written in song, in folk tales and by calling the mountains and rivers names in our language,” said Suwichan, one of 500,000 Karen in northern Thailand. “We used traditional natural farming, with a seven-year rotation for our rice and other crops. But since the government has declared our area a national park we are no longer allowed to practice this kind of farming, which has forced us to use chemical fertilizers. We lived in symbiosis with the forest and relied on it for wild plants and foods as we protected it. Now our forest has been designated a wildlife reserve and we are no longer allowed to take anything out of it. But they never consulted us about this, they never consulted our ancestors or our community leaders. My parents say we are now like orphan chickens, that we each have a small voice, but together with the others at ITM it may become louder.”

‘A Universal Language’
“As Carlo Petrini says, we need to defend our native plants and animal breeds, our flavors and methods, for they are a universal language,” LaDuke said. “We have fought to reject the patents industrial agriculture has tried to put on our indigenous varieties. Our food is pre-colonial, pre-GMO and pre-petroleum. We are part of a movement to stop the theft of our seeds and land, and the theft of our economies. We fight against the politics of those who try to oppress us, and the closer the links between all of our tribes can get, the stronger our resistance will be.”

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A restaurant industry trade group is suing New York City’s Board of Health to stop it from enforcing a new rule requiring many chain restaurants to post warnings on menu items that are high in sodium.

The National Restaurant Association says the Board of Health unfairly burdened restaurant owners and usurped the power of the popularly elected City Council by forcing restaurants with more than 15 locations nationwide to warn diners about salty foods.

Backed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, the rule, believed the first of its kind nationally, requires restaurants to post a saltshaker encased in a black triangle as a warning symbol next to any menu item with more than 2,300 milligrams of sodium, the daily limit many nutritionists recommend.

New York City adopted the rule, which took effect on Dec.1, in an effort to help lower blood pressure and reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

The rule also applies to concession stands at some movie theatres and sports stadiums. Violators would be punished by a $200 fine, starting on March 1, 2016.

In papers being filed with the state Supreme Court in Manhattan, the restaurant group likened the rule to former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s failed effort to curb sales of sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces.

“The regulation, like the Soda Ban before it, is completely arbitrary in its scope, reach, and application,” says the group. “With the Sodium Mandate, the Board has required the disclosure of just enough inaccurate and controversial information about sodium in certain food items to cause far reaching negative consequences rather than help consumers and reduce public health risks.”

The papers could not be independently verified in court records.

Nick Paolucci, a spokesman for the city’s law department, says, “We are confident that the Board of Health has the authority to enact this rule. We will review the specific claims once we are served with the lawsuit.”

Bloomberg was known for pushing health initiatives in New York. Some, including requiring fast-food restaurants to post calorie counts and banning smoking in public places, have found growing acceptance elsewhere.

The National Restaurant Association calls itself the world’s largest food service trade association, supporting more than 500,000 restaurant businesses.

The case is National Restaurant Association v. New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene et al, New York State Supreme Court, New York County.

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The U.S. FDA has issued new rules designed to prevent foodborne illnesses caused by tainted produce that sicken millions of Americans each year, the agency said on November 13.

The final rules put teeth into the FDA’s ability to enforce food safety by establishing safety standards for produce farms and making importers accountable for verifying that imported foods meet U.S. safety standards.

The FDA said the new rules will help produce farmers and food importers take steps to prevent problems before they occur. The changes are part of the 2011 Food Safety Modernization Act, or FSMA, a sweeping package of food safety reforms governing produce safety, preventive controls for food produced in facilities, and the safety of imported food.

“The recent multistate outbreak of Salmonella in imported cucumbers that has killed four Americans, hospitalized 157 and sickened hundreds more, is exactly the kind of outbreak these rules can help prevent,” Michael Taylor, FDA deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, said in a statement.

The Produce Safety rule includes requirements for water quality, employee health and hygiene, wild and domesticated animals, compost and manure, and equipment, tools, and buildings.

The final rule includes public comments and input from hundreds of farm visits and meetings with stakeholders, the FDA said.

Under the new Foreign Supplier Verification rule, food importers will be required to verify that suppliers are producing food that meets U.S. safety standards. The FDA also issued guidelines governing the accreditation of third-party auditors to conduct food safety audits on foreign food facilities.

In 2013, the USDA estimated that imported food accounted for 19 percent of the U.S. food supply, including 52 percent of fresh fruits and 22 percent of fresh vegetables.

In a conference call, Taylor said he is confident that the new rules will improve food safety, but said success is contingent on full funding of President Barack Obama’s 2016 budget request.

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Wiley is a major international publisher with one of the world’s leading programs in food safety and all other aspects of food science and technology. Alongside Food Quality & Safety, Wiley publishes some of the major scholarly journals in this subject area as well as a huge range of book titles aimed at industry professionals, students, and researchers. If you have an idea for a new book or another publishing project, please send details to David McDade, executive editor, at david.mcdade@wiley.com.

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