The US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) inspects approximately 7.7 million food safety and food defense procedures across roughly 7,100 USDA regulated establishments. FSIS inspects over 161 million head of livestock, approximately 9.8 billion poultry carcasses and 2.8 billion lbs of liquid, frozen and dried egg products a year.

From Jan.1, 2024, to Feb. 12, 2025, FSIS issued 59 recalls and public health alerts related to meat and poultry products. Recalls can cause consumer illness, plant shutdowns, sometimes permanently, loss of business, sometimes with long recovery and general suffering to all involved, but there will always be risk, and food will never be 100% safe.

The farmers, processors, regulatory entities, the government, academia, consumers and all the stakeholders in food production, must still work diligently and place food safety No. 1 on their lists of objectives, but it’s complicated. In the aftermath of last year’s Boar’s Head recall, involving 7 million lbs of bratwurst and other ready-to-eat deli meats contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes linked to 10 deaths and 60 hospitalizations across 19 states, the company formed a four-member Food Safety Council, led by Frank Yiannas, the council’s chief food safety advisor who was previously Deputy Commissioner for Food Policy & Response at the US Food and Drug Administration.

Risk negotiation

Martin Wiedmann, PhD, Veterinary Degree from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Cornell University Gellert Family Professor in Food Safety and the co-director of the New York State Integrated Food Safety Center of Excellence, and part of Boar’s Head’s recently formed Food Safety Council, said the risks that inherently come along with food production that society as a whole and everyone involved needs to agree on are what level of risks are acceptable.  

“That acceptable risk might differ by food,” Wiedmann said. “The risk I’m willing to accept if I eat raw oysters, and the consumer might be willing to accept it, is going to be different in the risk if I eat Cheerios, or if I feed my kids infant formula and so on.”

The less risk stakeholders in the food industry are willing to accept comes at a cost. That higher cost could include higher prices of food to customers and consumers that want food to be a safe as it can possibly be. The cost could also be a different taste or sensory profile.

“It could be a loss of your cultural identity even,” Wiedmann said. “Your culture and cultural identity can be linked, so part of cultural identity can be linked to food, and if I say, ‘Oysters, that’s part of how I grew up. For multiple generations, that was part of my upbringing, this is part of my family, part of my heritage.’ And then we just kind of cook these oysters because you have to manage the risk, that person loses something. There’s a certain willingness to accept certain risks with things that are important for you, and I think it’s a risk negotiation. I think this is important versus a one-way communication.”

When it comes to food safety, no two plants are the same, so every plant must mitigate the risks present in its own unique situation. If a plant is brand new with all stainless steel, state-of-the-art equipment designed to be hygienic and easy to clean, and another is 30 or 40 years old and using older equipment, the older plant may cost significantly more to ensure cleanliness and possibly spend more on testing.

“For every company, it’s a business risk versus a public health risk,” said David Acheson, MD, FRCP, founder and chief executive officer of The Acheson Group, a global food safety consulting company, and a member of the Boar’s Head Food Safety Council. “It is a titration because you’re not going to guarantee. You just try to minimize that risk to the extent you can afford to do it. Regulatory compliance is the baseline, so you know you’ve got to be compliant, and for many, that’s what they seek.”

Back to basics

Acheson and Wiedmann both stressed the foundations and fundamentals of food safety. Things like identifying where the risks in processing operations exist, actively and consistently managing those in charge of cleaning, sanitation training, separation of clean side/dirty side if necessary, hygienic manufacturing processes, etc., play a crucial role in building the foundations of food safety and instilling the fundamentals of food safety into a company’s culture.

“So, really understanding the fundamentals of food safety,” Acheson said. “And whether it’s meat and poultry or it’s milk or it’s bagels doesn’t matter. If it’s Listeria in your hot dog facility, after you cook the dogs, before you put them in a packet, it’s all about understanding where the risks are in your facility and controlling them.”

Wiedmann said the first step toward ensuring food safety is to assess the relative risk associated with the presence of hazards. Once that is done, the validated and verified interventions to control those hazards come into play whether those interventions are in place at the facility, or something needs to be added.

“Say Salmonella in my raw product coming in from a poultry farm is a risk,” he said. “Well, what am I doing in my facility to control it? Have an antimicrobial wash and so on and so on. And how do I know this strategy is validated? And then how do I verify it’s done every day? Or do you decide these controls need to happen further down the supply chain?

“Do I require spices from somewhere for my product? Does something need to be done to those spices to control the risks or to mitigate the risk? But I need to make sure my supplier has it in place, so I need to have to have a conversation with the supplier and then need to know and have visibility that they consistently implement a control strategy to mitigate that.”

Food safety’s future

Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain and the internet of things continue to gain momentum in the processing industry, and they have all been applied to food safety as possible tools to address shortcomings that pop up. However, Wiedmann and Acheson both said these things are not a silver bullet to make food safe.

“We still need to pay attention to the foundational pillars of food safety,” Wiedmann said. “It might not improve much if we invest money into AI rather than investing in new clean up equipment.”

Wiedmann said he does do research on AI and is excited about it, but the focus should remain on the fundamentals of food safety with AI layered on top of it.

“And I think many parts of the food industry are not 100% ready,” he said.

Acheson said a more proactive approach by individual companies is the easiest way to improve food safety moving forward. Food producers understand the food safety risks, and they know how to mitigate those risks with the regulatory standards to be compliant, but to improve a company might need to do more.

“A lot of companies understand they need to keep these bad bugs out,” Acheson said. “But they haven’t actually taken a step back and asked are we doing everything that we can do, and truly, objectively looked at their programs.”

It’s sometimes a matter of the food safety program working as it should for years without an incident or any problems, a situation that becomes business as usual, and it works until it doesn’t. Acheson said these are the perfect situations to take that step back and assess, even though there’s not necessarily a reason to at the moment, companies should use that as the reason to do it.

“So, it’s not that they don’t get it fundamentally, but did they take the time to put their head up above the parapet and say, are we still as good as we could be,” Acheson said. “And then you can sort of look at that and say, well yeah, we could do things better.”