Food Quality & Safety
  • Home
  • About
    Us
    • Food Quality & Safety‘s Mission
    • Contact Us
    • Authors
    • Manage Subscription
    • Advertise
    • Magazine Archive
    • Copyright
    • Privacy Policy
  • On the
    Farm
  • Safety & Sanitation
    • Environmental Monitoring
    • Hygiene
    • Pest Control
    • Clean In Place
    • Allergens
    • Sanitizing
    • Training
  • Quality
    • Authenticity
    • Textures & Flavors
    • Labeling
    • Shelf Life
    • Outsourcing
    • Auditing/Validation
    • Supplier Programs
  • Testing
    • Seafood
    • Dairy
    • Hormones/Antibiotics
    • Produce
    • Ingredients
    • Beverages
    • Meat & Poultry
    • Animal Food
  • In the
    Lab
    • Lab Software
    • Pathogen Control
    • Physical Properties
    • Contaminants
    • Measurement
    • Sampling
  • Manufacturing & Distribution
    • Information Technology
    • Plant Design
    • Foreign Object Control
    • Temperature/Humidity
    • Packaging
    • Transportation
    • Tracking & Traceability
  • Food Service & Retail
    • Cleaning & Sanitizing
    • Stock Management
    • Hygiene
    • Food Preparation
    • Allergens
    • Education
    • Temperature Monitoring
  • Regulatory
    • FSMA
    • Guidelines & Regulations
    • Recalls
  • Resources
    • Whitepaper
    • Webinars
    • Video
    • Events
    • Food Library
    • Jobs
  • FQ&S
    Award
  • Search

Is Europe Outpacing the U.S. in Traceability? – ONLINE EXCLUSIVE

August 8, 2013 • By Colin Thurston

  • Tweet
Print-Friendly Version

The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) in the U.S. continues to be the talk of the food and beverage industry these days. But what seems to be lost in all the talk is that U.S. regulations and requirements—even if/when the Act is fully rolled out—will still be less strict than those of Europe. For more than a decade, European authorities and producers have been held to higher standards for food quality than any other region worldwide, and the results have matched the regulation: Europe has one of the lowest levels of food contamination in the world.

You Might Also Like
  • ‘Boat-to-Plate’ Traceability
  • Tune Up Traceability with Enterprise Resource Planning
  • Nuts and Bolts of FSMA
Explore This Issue
August/September 2013
Also By This Author
  • Put Your Product to the Test: LIMS Enhances Product Safety Testing
ad goes here:advert-1
ADVERTISEMENT
SCROLL TO CONTINUE

What makes Europe’s success so remarkable is how complex the system is: Despite strict regulations enforced to protect more than 500 million people, compliance takes place without interfering with the independence of the EU’s 27 sovereign nations. Such a structure would be impossible without a massive technology infrastructure and investment in state-of-the-art data management technologies, including laboratory information management systems (LIMS), which are widely used by industry and governments to structure laboratory sampling, analysis, and reporting tasks and integrate food quality data across vast enterprise systems.

What Makes Europe Different?
Europe has had its share of safety issues. Several food crises, including outbreaks of mad cow disease (formally known as Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or BSE), Salmonella, and botulism, led to the establishment of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in 2002. The organization’s mission is straightforward, but ambitious: “To deliver independent, high-quality, and timely scientific advice on risks in the food chain from farm to fork in an integrated manner and to communicate on those risks in an open manner to all interested parties and the public at large.”

If achieving this goal wasn’t challenging enough, EFSA must do all this while respecting the sovereignty of the EU’s member states. The dramatic rise in international trade over the last 20 years, coupled with increasingly complex supply chains in food manufacturing, means that new rules must be all-encompassing without being stifling. While Europe needed stricter regulations in 2002, the EFSA had to promulgate them in concert with the food safety authorities of individual nations within the EU.

ad goes here:advert-2
ADVERTISEMENT
SCROLL TO CONTINUE

According to its website, “to ensure the high quality of its work, EFSA has developed guidance on methodologies for the risk assessment and the risk monitoring it undertakes.” The same law that established the EFSA—Regulation EC/178/2002—laid the groundwork for implementation guidelines, principles, and procedures. For example, any food produced in Europe or imported is now subject to some of the strictest traceability requirements in the world. The regulation requires that manufacturers and distributers have “the ability to trace and follow food, feed, and ingredients through all stages of production, processing, and distribution.”

Since the rules apply to imported food as well, companies based in the U.S. and other non-European nations must comply if they wish to continue selling in Europe. This means that for a candy bar to be shelved in a Paris grocery store, its Illinois-based candy manufacturer must be able to identify which North Carolina farm grew the peanuts inside the bar.

To date, the EFSA’s massive undertaking is working. The organization cooperates with more than 400 organizations within the EU to carry out food testing, and since 2002 the EFSA has published more than 2,500 “scientific outputs”—pieces of research used to institute new regulations or modify existing rules. The number of cases of BSE has fallen from thousands each year before the institution of the EFSA to only 44 in 2010, and now only two percent of EU residents consider mad cow to be a possible food risk. Salmonella contamination has fallen off even more dramatically, decreasing by 50 percent from 2004 to 2009.

ad goes here:advert-3
ADVERTISEMENT
SCROLL TO CONTINUE

Pages: 1 2 | Single Page

Filed Under: FSMA, Guidelines & Regulations, Regulatory, Tracking & Traceability Tagged With: europe, Food, Food Quality, food quality and safety, Food Safety, FSMA, Quality, Safety, TraceabilityIssue: August/September 2013

You Might Also Like:
  • ‘Boat-to-Plate’ Traceability
  • Tune Up Traceability with Enterprise Resource Planning
  • Nuts and Bolts of FSMA
  • Getting Imported Foods on the Straight and Narrow

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Current Issue

October/November 2019

  • Issue Articles »
  • Current Issue PDF »
  • Subscribe »
  • Follow Us:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn

Food Quality & Safety Blog  

Managing Change as a Food Safety Professional

… [Read More]

Previous posts »

Paid Partner Content

Avoiding Overwhelming Product Recall Costs

Innovative food safety inspection systems are being developed in Germany. Learn more about the latest technologies from Bizerba and benefit from our free guidelines ensuring consistent food production safety.

  • Recall News
  • Industry News
    • Cay Thi Queentrees Food USA Recalls Poultry Products
    • Padrino Foods, LLC Recalls Beef Tamales
    • Simmons Prepared Foods, Inc. Recalls Poultry Products
    • Rastelli Bros., Inc. Recalls Meat Products
    View more »
    • Researchers Uncover Science Behind Using UV Light to Disarm Pathogens
    • In Memoriam: Daniel Y. C. Fung, PhD
    • E. coli Illness Linked to Romaine Lettuce Expands
    • Salmonella Outbreak and Ground Beef Recall Stir Transparency Debate
    • FDA Extends Deadline for Supply-Chain Approval
    View more »

Polls

How interested is your company in cannabis testing for its food/beverage products?

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...
  • Polls Archive

Whitepapers

  • Food Authenticity Testing with Agilent 6546 LC/Q-TOF and MassHunter Classifier

View More Whitepapers »

On-Demand Webinars

  • Reduce Non-Recyclable Materials
  • Why a Food Safety Culture Is Critical to Your Business

View More Webinars »

Food Quality & Safety (formerly Food Quality) is the established authority in delivering strategic and tactical approaches necessary for quality assurance, safety, and security in the food and beverage industry.

Advertise / Targeted list rental/3rd Party emails / Subscribe / Contact Us / Privacy Policy / Terms of Use

ASBPE Award Winner

Copyright © 2000–2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., a Wiley Company. All rights reserved. ISSN 2399-1399

Wiley

This site uses cookies: Find out more.