the companies will be blamed

It’s National Food Safety Month. Do you know where your food safety program is? 

Probably in some level of disconnect. I mean, who perfectly catalogues all the testing results, tracks them, plots them and shares them reliably with team members so they all have insight into the most important responsibility in the plant? Who is using predictive data to identify food safety threats before they become recalls?

If that’s your company, congratulations. You should be giving “best practices” presentations at every industry conference.

Everybody else, take note: Food safety is less of a given now than at any time in the last 100 years — not because companies are slacking off but because the food safety infrastructure is rusting and listing to starboard. That means company programs have to be locked in tight, first, to protect the consumer and second, because any contamination that does get into the market, even if it could be blamed on the rickety system, will instead be blamed on you.

Consider those vacant FSIS inspectors’ positions: It’s been a persistent problem for years, but the DOGE efforts to reduce headcount have exacerbated the situation. As of May, more than 15,000 USDA employees had resigned or been terminated since January, about 15% of the agency’s overall workforce. The departed include about 550 FSIS employees (not necessarily inspectors) and nearly 1,400 at APHIS.

Then, in August, the Trump administration announced plans to end union contracts covering about 6,500 employees at FSIS and nearly 150 plant health inspectors at APHIS. The move angered consumer groups: “This is not complicated: this union protects the workers who protect the food we put on our plates,” Sarah Sorscher, director of Regulatory Affairs at Center for Science in the Public Interest, said at the time. It should have angered industry groups and companies more. (Predictably, lawsuits are pending.)

The answer is not to move more of those inspection responsibilities to company employees, although that is a factor in the effort to increase line speeds in poultry and pork plants. Again, not because the industry can’t do their own inspections well, but because consumers don’t trust them to do their own inspections.

There’s more. Last spring, the Food Emergency Response Network Proficiency Testing program was suspended, taking away a level of quality assurance in food safety testing that had ensured consistency and proficiency in government labs. In July, pathogen surveillance was severely curtailed when FoodNet dropped mandatory tracking of campylobacter, cyclospora, listeria, shigella, vibrio and yersinia, keeping only E. coli and Salmonella on the required list.

And did you hear about the E. coli outbreak traced to Romaine lettuce in late 2024? Few people did, because the FDA didn’t send any public communications or announcements about the contamination at all. This, despite the fact that nearly 90 people got sick in 15 states, and one person died in the outbreak.

The list goes on.

These changes are promoted by the administration as excising unnecessary overhead in these agencies. I’m sure the federal government could operate more efficiently. However, the cuts that have been made to the vast, connected food safety systems are alarming.

Processors are used to working on a trapeze, where landing just right is everything and one inch too far to the left means a long fall. But now that net of surveillance, recalls and communications that’s broken their landing for decades has holes in it and they’re getting bigger.

It’s National Food Safety Month, and your food safety program better be perfect from design to execution.

Is it?

Are you sure?

Bonus material: Meatingplace blogger Shawn Stevens’ piece on how a company’s food safety program is like an NFL team makes the concept of “food safety” wildly accessible.

And fellow blogger Sharon K.K. Beals’ essay on the importance of joining or at least being present with your sanitation crew during the shift is the best kind of food safety effort a company’s office and lab workers can make.