HANK GICLAS | SR. VICE PRESIDENT, STRATEGIC PLANNING, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
Food Safety – Let’s Take a Step Back In a recent article, I talked about Western Growers’ leadership in the food safety arena. For decades now, Western Growers has been the leader in what has been the single largest shift in food safety culture for growers and handlers on record. We have worked hand-in-glove with our members to design and consistently enhance preventive controls in the field as the first line of defense in food safety. Our member companies, steadfastly committed to providing the safest, highest quality produce in the world, have quietly and diligently worked to create a food safety paradigm that has now spread beyond the West and beyond those few commodities- of-concern to the entire produce industry. The Produce Safety Rule—which affects (almost) all suppliers both foreign and domestic—incorporates much of the seminal work that we, as a Western industry, have labored over for the last decade. We truly have made a difference. Despite that very productive work, foodborne illness
that has been guiding us for the last decade and move to a formal quantitative risk assessment process. Growers and handlers deserve to better understand where their efforts and investments are best deployed. And as leaders in the food safety arena, it is incumbent upon us to help them gain that understanding. So how do we go about this? In
outbreaks continue to occur. Now is not the time to grow weary, but to think through and act on what more we can do and what we can do better. While others are recommending unrealistic deadlines and questionable priorities for the leafy greens industry—recommendations I believe set the Leafy
Greens Marketing Agreements up for failure. I think our next smartest course of action is to take a step back and work directly with Western Growers to aggregate food safety data to inform our next steps. Let me explain. What has been talked about for quite some time now in food safety circles is the need for quantitative risk assessments (QRA) that can truly make an impact—using real-world experience, data, and costs of key food safety interventions—on public health. Analyzing risk is very consistent with the grower/handler mentality. There are many hazards associated with growing fresh produce outdoors in a largely uncontrollable environment, and industry astutely wants to know which of those hazards are the most important, which translate to the highest risk, and if you
2012, Drs. Rock, Gerba and Bright, a very competent team hailing from the University of Arizona (UA), showed the way with a Center for Produce Safety study entitled, “Assessment of E. coli as an indicator of microbial quality for irrigation water use for produce.” While the first phase of this study looked at comparing methods for detecting E. coli in irrigation water as well as factors that might influence false positives, the second phase was about evaluating the risks associated with varying irrigation methods. Specifically, Dr. Rock’s team set out to: 1) develop an exposure scenario (model) for E. coli in irrigation waters; 2) estimate the risk of illness from ingestion of various levels of E. coli from varying irrigation scenarios; 3) develop a simple, user-friendly guideline
Today, I am calling on Western Growers
members to share with us their food safety data in order to empower the industry to make meaningful changes to food safety programs.
have a dollar to spend on food safety interventions, where is that dollar best spent? I don’t think we can sit here today with the data that we currently have and say the next best investment is in the development of controls for furrow irrigation systems. It is time to put industry and agency data to work for the benefit of all. We need to take the qualitative risk assessment work
for estimating risk of infection from the different irrigation scenarios; and 4) compare their results to risks associated with current standards (at the time 126 CFU/100 mL). This is a quantitative risk assessment—and specifically a Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA). QMRA is a data-driven process that estimates the risk of infection and/
40 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2019
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