Results from the study also indicated that refrigerated and dairy foods have the highest general risk of food safety problems compared to other food categories. Based on the number of votes by experts who participated in the elicitation, "deficient employee training," "contamination of raw materials," "poor plant and equipment sanitation," and "poor plant design and construction" were ranked as the top four food safety problems faced by food manufacturers today. The expert elicitation identified the most significant food safety problems, foods at high risk for these problems, and other major areas of concern. (ERG) undertook this study comprising an extensive literature review and an expert elicitation of current food safety problems and the range of preventive controls needed to address them. Under contract to FDA, Eastern Research Group, Inc. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently evaluating its food GMPs regulations to ensure that they take today's technologies and food safety hazards into account. The food safety literature reviewed for this study shows that there continue to be food safety problems. While GMPs can control for many food safety problems, it is not clear that current GMPs adequately address these new developments.
We are currently accumulating a huge mountain of waste! 44% of global waste consists of food and greens, of which a significant portion is food waste (World Bank, 2018).Since the last revision of food Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs) almost 20 years ago, the food manufacturing industry has seen many changes, including newly recognized pathogens, more sophisticated technologies, and increased automation. So therefore all food wasted, edible and inedible, becomes an issue for our planet. In our opinion, all parts of food (simply speaking: the whole food item) require resources along the chain and each part of it may eventually emit damaging side effects when it ends up in landfill. Most researchers and statisticians therefore decide to include all food wasted (inedible and edible) in their estimations. However, there are cultural differences in interpreting if food is edible or not, and there's no clear consensus on how much food waste is actually edible in terms of percentage of food wasted. Unavoidable food derives from food elements that can't be eaten, such as meat bones, egg shells, or pineapple skins (Buchner et al. There is simply no right or wrong way to define it, and so to keep things simple we decided to call the entire issue from farm to fork: Food Waste “Food loss and waste”: a decrease at all stages of the food system from production to consumption, in mass and/or quality, of food that was originally intended for human consumption, regardless of the cause (FAO, 2017).“Food waste”: food appropriate for human consumption being discarded or left to spoil at consumer level – regardless of the cause (HLPE, 2014).Food losses occur along the supply chain from production, to harvest, post-harvest handling, to storage and processing, and during transportation (FAO, 2017) “Food loss”: a decrease in quantity and quality of agricultural, forestry and fishery products intended for human consumption that are ultimately not eaten by people.So, here are some different interpretations as well as our own take on this. Whilst plenty of research has been conducted on the issue, there still isn't a clear and consistent approach when it comes to defining or quantifying food waste.