Frank Yiannas is worried the fresh produce industry is moving on too quickly from the cyclospora and salmonella outbreaks from this summer. However, there’s a lot for the industry to learn from, according to the former deputy commissioner for food policy and response at the Food and Drug Administration.
Yiannas joined “The Packer Podcast” to discuss how the industry needs to move forward.
He says it’s no secret that the entire fresh produce industry is down in sales, especially since bagged salads — which saw the cyclospora outbreak contribute to a sales decline — help draw consumers into the category where they’ll likely buy additional produce items along with them.
“Gallup published their most recent poll, and it showed that trust in food safety is at an all-time low,” Yiannas says, noting 35% of consumers say they’re not confident in the food sold at grocery stores. “A majority of Americans now no longer trust the federal government to ensure the safety of food. And 73% of Americans said they’ve avoided a food due to food recalls.”
These are big implications with consumer trust being lost, he says.
Uncovering Root Causes Over Simple Reporting
Instead of just reporting on the outbreaks, Yiannas says the industry needs really needs to focus on why the outbreaks happened.
“Because unless we understand why they happened, we can’t prevent them from happening again,” he says. “Why is it that we couldn’t get down there fast enough? Why couldn’t we do a better root cause investigation for at least a few of these outbreaks and really inform the industry? These are the breakdowns. These were the root causes and contributing factors. That’s missing, and I fear that that’s going to be a problem going forward.”
Yiannas says it’s also important for the industry to pause and understand why this outbreak has led to a trust bust.
“We’ve seen outbreaks in the past,” he says. “Certainly, they’ve affected consumer behavior, but the way the consumer is responding this time around, I think, is really unprecedented.”
He says it’s important to understand how shifts in social media and consumer dynamics this summer changed how consumers feel.
“When this one’s all said and done and studied, it’s going to have a much deeper effect,” he says.
The way food safety outbreaks are investigated needs to change, too; Yiannas points to the U.S. having one of the best foodborne illness disease surveillance systems in the world. But he adds there needs to be more of a focus on why the outbreaks happen.
“I think we can do better investigating these outbreaks so that we don’t just pull product from the marketplace, but we understand why these events happen and prevent them from happening again,” he says.
Assessing Water Quality and Environmental Hazards
Water has likely played a role in the produce outbreaks, Yiannas says, especially the cyclospora outbreak this summer.
“It’s hard to think about an outbreak of that size where water might have not played a role,” he says.
The fresh produce industry needs to focus more on water quality, whether it’s preharvest or postharvest. Yiannas points to a new preharvest water standard released by FDA. While the standard goes beyond a simple water test, he says conditions change and weather changes, and these factors can all influence the quality of the water being used.
“You need to assess potential risks of your water, any hazards that might get into your water, make sure you understand the method of application and whether you need to introduce additional controls,” he says. “And so even if you’ve done that, I say that should be a continuous exercise. It’s not one and done. You don’t evaluate the risk to your water just one day out of the year. It’s continual.”
Comparing Outbreak Responses and Traceability Speed
Yiannas also points to the two major food safety outbreaks this summer with cyclospora and salmonella as a major compare-and-contrast moment. He says the fresh produce industry needs to also focus on prevention.
“People think traceability is just about we’ve had an outbreak, we’ve identified a food product, and now we need to trace it back to source,” he says. “That’s part of traceability, but there’s an element of traceability that is really important to solving these difficult outbreaks.”
When reports of people falling ill came in, public health officials need to find a correlation between person, place and time and the food those people ate.
“You take those food ingredients that are commonly identified, whether it was the tomatoes or the onions or the lettuce, and then with traceback, you determine if it strengthens or weakens the hypothesis,” he says. “And evidently, the traceback must have said, well, the tomatoes came from different sources at all these restaurants. The onions came from different sources. The lettuce did not. It converged on one lettuce supplier. And so, it must be the lettuce. And so, that’s why traceability is important.”
With the cyclospora outbreak, Yiannas says public health officials asked several times in early July for traceability records and the FDA also had to ask about additional records, and the time it took from request to fulfillment slowed public health officials’ ability to form or strengthen the hypothesis about the cause of the illnesses.
It was a completely different situation with the salmonella outbreak, Yiannas says. While a lot of patrons reported eating guacamole, there are several produce items that go into the final product.
“That chain, because they had invested in traceability for years and had very modern systems, was able to run traceability quickly on all of those ingredients,” he says. “And [it] handed, in essence, [information] to the regulators on a silver platter and say, ‘Hey, we think it’s actually the jalapeno peppers. And they were able to pull it before the regulators actually asked them to take action and contain and prevent illnesses.”
And this, Yiannas says, illustrates what good traceability looks like in action while highlighting opportunities for improvement.
“When we talk about the need to get on with better food traceability, it isn’t just about being able to trace products back to source, but it’s to have confidence that we’ve identified the right food vehicle in these types of outbreaks,” he says.
