Budget Cuts

Programs like the one suggested by DeWaal face an overwhelming job with minimal resources, however. While the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) oversees the safety of meat, poultry, and egg products, the FDA is responsible for virtually all other foods, including produce and vegetables. In the 2008 budget proposal, the USDA is set to receive $270 million in new money for food safety, but the FDA will only get $10.6 million.

“The bottom line is that we’ve seen the food-safety part of the FDA. We’ve seen their budget cut, and that’s not a good thing,” Schaffner says. “They need more resources, they need more scientists, they need the ability to go out there and find the cause of these problems.”

A report compiled by California’s Rep. Henry Waxman in 2006 found that since 2003 the number of FDA field inspectors dropped by 12 percent and since 1972 the FDA has reduced its number of yearly inspections from about 50,000 to 13,567 in 2003. Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson told The Associated Press in February that since Sept. 11, Congress has pushed for more food inspections to better ensure national security and that has added to the agency’s burden. “Now it’s worse, because there are more inspections to do—more facilities—and more food coming into America,” Thompson said.

Technology Solutions

Despite the risks from farms not following GAPs, modern technology can keep store managers abreast on the safety of in-store products says Jim Melvin, chief strategy officer of PAR Technology which provides systems and service integration solutions for the quick-serve industry.

“We’re looking at ServSafe and making sure that the reports for all of our technologies match that,” Melvin says. Hygiene is the area where Melvin predicts the demand for technology to increase the most. He forecasts there will be an increase in federal legislation over back-of-the-house hygiene practices, and quick-serves will be looking for ways to use technology to enforce the new rules.

Although PAR Technology’s current hygiene system is too expensive to be implemented in stores now, the company continues to create ways to track employment hygiene in preparation for when the price drops. “We’ve got a system today that is actually an RFID badge that goes on the employee and basically gets a light on it that’s red, yellow, or green and if you’re green that means your hands are clean,” Melvin says.

Once an employee enters a restricted area or fails to wash his hands after two hours, the badge turns to red and notifies the manager. “We want to apply a lot of peer pressure,” Melvin says. “Until he stands in front of the hand-washing device… he’s not going to be green again.”

Technology can also combat the language barriers that often exist in the back of the house. Melvin’s product will prompt employees in seven languages and the NRAEF’s ServSafe program is available in English, Chinese, Spanish, and Korean.

Melvin did warn, however, that while technology can help secure food from the packaging center to the dining room table, there is little that can be done if the contamination occurs on the farms. “In an E. coli outbreak, any technologies that are recommended by the Food and Drug Administration and the ServSafe program, none of those are really going to come into play when you have a contamination that occurs in the growing fields,” he says.