The FSA has launched a consultation on European Commission proposals to replace EU regulation 882/2004 on official controls for feed and food law, which sets out how businesses’ compliance with the law should be monitored and enforced. We want your views to help inform the UK Government response.

The next All-Island Obesity Action Forum Meeting will be of interest to those working in the food and catering industry. This meeting will look at the current habits of consumers, an evaluation of the ‘calories on menus’ initiative and also the introduction of new tools for food businesses.
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The British Council has launched a call for early-career researchers to propose an international research placement. Researchers that reside in the UK can apply for funding to spend up to 3 months at a university or research institution in one of the nineteen partner countries, and those residing in one of the partner countries can apply for funding to come to the UK. All research areas are covered, including the natural sciences, humanities and social sciences, but some countries have priority areas. The countries involved in this call are; Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Morocco, Egypt, Qatar, South Africa, Nigeria, Russia (Humanities and Social Sciences only), Turkey, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Vietnam, Bangladesh and the United States of America (Humanities and Social Sciences only).

The call guidelines and application form can be found at http://www.britishcouncil.org/society/science/researcher-links

The call deadline is 24th November 2013

Food chain scandals are constantly sprawled across the media, raising real concerns about what is really in the food that we are eating. Most people are guilty of indulging in fast food once in a while, whether it’s enjoying a burger on a Friday night in front of the TV or some crunchy fried chicken that seems all too appealing after a night out. However, after years of the negative media attention that these mammoth fast food chains receive, maybe we’ve always had some kind of inclination that fast food isn’t the most trustworthy.

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There’s a great deal of research on the subject, but parsing the hundreds of studies done on GMO safety requires more time and expertise than most of us have. Instead, we look to someone else, someone we trust, to do it for us. And so the question of whether GMOs are safe becomes a very different question: Whom do you trust?

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Fight Bac! and the Partnership for Food Safety Education have been educating the public about food safety myths and facts for years. Food Poisoning Bulletin recently attended one of their webinars where they addressed those myths. Their latest is: pre packaged produce doesn’t need washing.

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The Food Standards Agency has organised a working group to look at ways to reduce cadmium levels in brown meat from crabs through different processing methods. The group will develop guidance for the crab processing industry to achieve this reduction of levels. The first meeting will take place in October.

The working group has been set up, following a request from the European Commission for each European Union member state to produce guidance on the consumption of brown meat from crabs, as it can contain high levels of cadmium.

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The Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLPC) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) are pleased to announce the release of a comprehensive report, The Dating Game: How Confusing Food Date Labels Lead to Food Waste in America.

This report presents a first-of-its-kind legal analysis of the confusing and piecemeal laws and practices impacting date labels, and lays out a blueprint calling on food industry actors and policymakers to create a better system that would help us maximize our food budgets, reduce food waste, and improve food safety in the United States.

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Over sixty companies attended the recent Insight Session held in Bord Bia around Tomorrow’s Shopper – the evolution of the shopper in Ireland and the UK. At the breakfast session, Bord Bia presented our latest research in this area, with two additional speakers – Ethan Sinick focussing on Tomorrow’s Retailer and Graham Merriman looking at how companies can respond to these digital changes.

In our report, four key drivers are identified as impacting the shoppers’ behaviour:

• Continued economic pressures affecting how and where we shop. Two thirds of shoppers now pre-plan their grocery visit, which in turn means brands need to work harder at point of sale to “interrupt” the shopper.
• With increasing need for convenience, smaller format stores are on the rise with people shopping more at their convenience stores on their path to purchase.
• The shopper increasingly wants greater transparency and to know where their food is coming from. Companies need to respond to this to build trust with the shopper.
• The rise of digital technology will be a macro driver and enabler for how we will interact with brands in the future. By 2015, 9 out of 10 of Irish people will own a smartphone and by the end of this year smartphones in the UK with outnumber PCs. With the rise of 4G networks we will see greater upload and download speeds enabling better interactions with brands and shoppers. Brands need to be aware of the various channels in which shoppers interact on their path to purchase and have a corresponding multi-channel digital strategy looking at online, mobile and social commerce.

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The FSA wants to recruit new-users and super-users. If you are keen to come on board as a UKFSS ‘new–user’ or are an existing user who can act as a source of expertise to support new local authorities coming on-board, then why not think about applying for FSA funding. The funding will be provided for training or other support activities.

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The FSA is seeking to recruit up to four Board members who can demonstrate achievement in a Board-level leadership role, a proven ability in strategic planning and in evaluating risk.
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The new members will be appointed by the Secretary of State for Health and will need to provide evidence of having driven change and delivering improvement across a diverse, multi-faceted stakeholder population. They will also need a genuine interest and understanding of the issues relating to food safety, standards and nutrition.

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The safefood Knowledge Networks Presentation Archive lists all the presentations from each Knowledge Network conference since they were launched in 2011. Each conference is aimed at food safety professionals, with a range of national and international speakers sharing their expert knowledge at each event. safefood are keen that the learning’s from these speakers can be shared beyond those who are able to attend the event. To date this has resulted in over one hundred presentations being made available online to the Knowledge Networks members. To ensure that this information can be easily accessed, this archive has been created. Under each conference heading you will find the speakers name and affiliation and the title of their presentation, where available a link is included to the presentation slides.

Presentation archive

The Food Standards Agency is encouraging food business to make the most of their food hygiene rating to help attract customers trade. A toolkit offering guidance, images, logos and web banners is available.

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After years of silence, Sysco Corporation employees across North America are finally speaking out about a longstanding practice by the world’s largest food distributor that put the public’s health at risk. Their startling revelations come in response to an NBC Bay Area investigation in July that uncovered 14 outdoor, unrefrigerated sheds across Northern California that the company used to store meat, dairy, produce, and other perishable food items

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The bacteria, which cause severe gastrointestinal illness and even death in humans, are spread by consuming contaminated food and water, or by contact with livestock feces in the environment. Cattle are the main reservoir for the bacterium.

The vaccines that are available for cattle are rarely used, but could be significant

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The number of antimicrobial-resistant Salmonella serotypes hasn’t increased drastically in recent years, but drug-resistant Salmonella continues to pose a public health threat in the United States, particularly as resistance spreads across classes of drugs, necessitates the use of more expensive drugs, makes treatment less effective, and, in worse-case scenarios, leaves infections untreatable.

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Scientists have figured out how virulent E. coli bacteria block a pathway that would normally protect the gut from infection.

These infections are particularly serious in young children and can result in diarrhea and other complications such as kidney damage.

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If wasted food became its own pungent country, it would be the world’s third biggest contributor to climate change.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization had previously determined that roughly one-third of food is wasted around the world. Now it has used those figures to calculate the environmental impacts of farming food that is never eaten, along with the climate-changing effects of the methane that escapes from food as it rots.

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The Food Standards Agency is inviting tenders for research that will help identify how vacuum and modified air packaging will affect the growth and survival of Listeria monocytogenes.
 

It will also look at how measures to reduce it may conflict with advice regarding control of Clostridium botulinum. The information will assist with the Agency’s Listeria Risk Reduction Management Programme, directed at reducing the risk of listeria to humans.

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The FAO has issued a toolkit for reducing food waste, as it reveals the direct economic cost to food producers stands at $750bn (€561bn) a year, in a new report.

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