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Study shows industry is ready to meet FSMA requirements

A recent Automation World survey indicates that many manufacturers are on track to meet Food Safety Modernization Act deadlines, but technology investments and a skills shortage make compliance a tedious task.

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The first major compliance date for the Food & Drug Administration’s Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) occurred on September 19, 2016. It requires large manufacturers of human and animal food to meet preventive controls and Current Good Manufacturing Practice (CGMPS) requirements. That means having a safety system in place that includes an analysis of hazards and risk-based preventive controls.

In order to meet these requirements, the FDA has recommended that food companies set up a thorough system for documenting what they do in order to demonstrate they are meeting the legal criteria. In addition, companies are required to put processes and procedures in place that prevent problems in the first place.

The good news is, the majority of companies are ready to show an FDA agent that they are—and will—comply with the current and future food safety regulations. According to an Automation World survey, 74 percent of respondents said they are on track to meet FSMA requirements around preventive controls for food safety, sanitary transportation and foreign supplier verification programs. The majority of companies (86.5 percent) are meeting this first compliance requirement mainly because they already have a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) plan in place, a food safety management system that has similar preventive control rules.

Key to HACCP enforcement—like FSMA compliance—is documentation, and 70.3 percent of respondents said they use a document management system to identify possible hazards in the food production process. The other technologies companies said they have in place as part of their HACCP plan include quality management systems (85.6 percent), a historian database (53.2 percent) enterprise resource planning (42.3 percent). Additional technologies in use include sensors and intelligent algorithms (35.1 percent) and food production management software (28.8 percent).

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