ORLANDO, Fla. — A theme of a food safety session at the Produce Marketing Association’s Fresh Summit was the need to get more research to companies who could use it.
Doug Grant, executive vice president and chief operations officer for the Oppenheimer Group, said at the Oct. 18 session there is a huge gap between the several hundred people who attend the Center for Produce Safety’s symposium and the thousands of other companies that could benefit from the research.
Grant, who is also a member of the center’s board of directors, said it has created a new subcommittee called the Knowledge Transfer Task Force, to partner with industry associations on food safety issues. CPS also is enhancing its website to make it more easily searchable for research results. The group is working on a series of monthly articles, to be distributed to the trade, on what individual companies are doing to apply CPS research and how that may relate to other industry operators.
“The idea there is to be able to show broad spectrum across a wide audience, with key areas of interest, what are companies actually doing to solve (issues) within their own companies,” Grant said, adding that such reports could be catalysts for other produce executives to engage in produce safety issues and implement the latest science in their organizations.
The session also looked at what research is needed to pinpoint the cause of the E. coli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce from Yuma, Ariz., last season.
Trevor Suslow, vice president of food safety for PMA, said there is still need to find what indicator organisms are significant for the safety of agricultural water and optimal ways to approach water treatment. More research also is needed on the potential implications for fresh produce produced near large animal feeding operations.
Other speakers at the event were Bonnie Fernandez-Fenaroli, executive director at the Center for Produce Safety, Bob Whitaker, chief science officer of the Produce Marketing Association, and Dave Corsi, vice president of produce and floral for Wegmans Food Markets and chairman of the center’s board of directors.
