Iowa State chosen as one of four regional ‘food safety’ centers

Awareness around the issue of foodborne illness has exploded in recent years - with incidents like those recently involving Chipotle Mexican Grill and Blue Bell Ice Cream regularly attracting national attention.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2011 took action to improve food supply safety by passing the 'most sweeping reform of our food safety laws in more than 70 years.” Now the government is establishing centers across the country to help food processors and growers comply with new federal regulations mandated through the Food Safety Modernization Act - including one at Iowa State University.

The FDA in February awarded Iowa State a three-year $950,000 grant to establish the new North Central Regional Center for Food Safety Training, which will provide guidance for businesses that grow and process food in 12 Midwestern states.

The Food Safety Modernization Act, which shifts the focus from responding to contamination to preventing it, called for establishment of a national center and four regional centers - hence the one at Iowa State.

Other centers are housed at the universities of Florida and Vermont and Oregon State University and will - like the Iowa State center - work to understand and communicate training opportunities to businesses in their regions. Each center also will work with non-governmental and community-based organizations - like cooperative extension services, food hubs, and local farm cooperatives - to assess and address specific needs of the communities they serve, according to the FDA.

The Food Safety Modernization Act focuses on areas like preventive controls, inspection, and compliance - mandating for the first time 'comprehensive, prevention-based controls across the food supply to prevent or significantly minimize the likelihood of problems occurring.”

One of seven major rules outlined in the act, for example, requires businesses meet science-based minimum standards for safe growing, harvesting, packing, and holding of fruits and vegetables grown for human consumption.

Companies also will have to update record keeping and training policies on food safety.

Angela Shaw, an ISU assistant professor of food science and human nutrition, is leading the launch of the Iowa-based regional center. Work, she said, began days after the FDA announced the ISU center, and her team is developing a survey to distribute this summer.

That survey will assess the type and degree of help local growers and processors need.

'I need to know what the priorities are for growers and processors,” she said. 'It's important to listen to that population.”

The center will focus on helping smaller-scale operations - somewhere between farmers-market small and massive like Dole or Fresh Express.

'We have a lot of growers in this state that do very well,” selling products to grocers like Whole Foods and Trader Joes, Shaw said. The size of a business determines how soon they need to comply with the new mandates, according to Shaw. The largest companies have to make a deadline in September, as they are more capable of devoting resources on the transition, she said. But smaller companies, like many ISU plans to aid, have longer - about four years.

'The smaller firms will have a harder time getting fully compliant because they don't have access to the same kind of resources,” Shaw said.

In its launch and planning, the Iowa State center will compare notes and ideas with the other centers.

'We are really trying to maximize resources,” she said.

Even though the FDA grant supporting the center is good for three years, Shaw said everyone involved at Iowa State has been doing the work for more than a decade.

'All of us are passionate in this area, so it's going to be continuous,” she said. 'We are going to continue even after our funds go.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 48 million people - one in six Americans - are sickened through foodborne illness every year, 128,000 of whom are hospitalized and 3,000 of whom die.

Shaw said food safety has grown as an area of concern, and food safety regulations needed to be modernized. Ever-advancing tools have made that possible, she told The Gazette.

'We're able to document more foodborne outbreaks now as detection and health care technology have improved,” she said. 'And social media and news media have helped food safety grow in stature as an important issue to people. Food safety rules should reflect those changes.”