It is imperative for the produce industry to identify and understand the cause or causes of food safety system failures during growing, harvesting and post-harvest operations. Root Cause Analysis is a method of evaluating failures and involves a systematic process to determine how and why a failure occurred. This approach is commonly applied to process ...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently shared with produce industry representatives their surveillance efforts of raw agricultural commodity romaine lettuce. This sampling assignment includes the collection of romaine lettuce samples to test for Salmonella spp. and Shiga Toxin-producing E. coli (STEC). Starting this month (November 2019), the FDA plans to collect 270 samples…
Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated their notices regarding the current E. coli O157:H7 outbreak, linked to romaine lettuce from the Salinas, California growing region. According to the CDC, there is now a total of 67 E. coli O157:H7 reported illnesses, an increase ...