Archive of July, 2025

An interesting article was just published entitled “Crowdsourcing: A new conceptual view for food safety and quality” (Jan Mei Soon,  and I. Sam Saguy). Our website can be a source of answers by the registered users, and as such can be a venue for crowdsourcing. Definition of Crowd Sourcing According to Merriam-Webster ” Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers” There is a trend of manufacturers of consumer goods for sourcing creative ideas from users particularly in...

In the last 3 days, six more recalls due to Listeria monocytogenes occurred. All are due to finding Listeria in the environment of suppliers. June 16, Chic-a-Peas LLC voluntarily recalled Chic-a-Peas Baked Crunchy Chickpeas 2 oz. packages because the product has the potential to be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes. This recall has been initiated because one of their manufacturing companies notified them that Listeria monocytogenes was found in the production environment June 16, NOW Health Group, Inc. (NOW), of Bloomingdale, Illinois, expanded the voluntary recall of a number of products. Evidence of facility contamination was noted after a follow-up FDA inspection of the Nutty Infusions supplier. The...

The FDA FSMA rule on Foreign Supplier Verification Program (FSVP) for Importers of Food for Humans and Animals is final, and the first compliance date begins on May 30, 2017. This rule imposes far reaching changes on food importers and requires review of the food safety practices of foreign suppliers and their compliance history.  Foreign suppliers must be approved in advance and must have a written program before they can be a supplier in the US.  The rule also requires new information to be submitted for customs entries: the FSVP importer must now be declared for each importation of FDA-regulated food (including...

The Journal of Dairy Sciences reports that a team of researchers from China (Zhao et al. J. Dairy Sci. 100:3480–3496  May 2107) developed a new method for the detection of Salmonella in infant powdered milk. The developed method is claimed to be rapid, specific, and sensitive. It is is based upon loop-mediated isothermal amplification technique combined with a lateral flow dipstick (LAMP-LFD) as the detection step. Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification Technique (LAMP) LAMP is a powerful new nucleic acid amplification method that detects very low levels of DNA. The method amplifies a few copies of target DNA with high specificity, efficiency and rapidity. The method uses a...