FSMA Fridays: How Prepared Is The Food Industry For FSMA? (Part Four Of Four)

View The Entire Webcast or Check out Part One, Part Two, and Part Three Of This Series

In part three of FSMA Fridays: How Prepared Is The Food Industry For FSMA? SafetyChain’s Jill Bender, along with The Acheson Group’s Dr. David Acheson and Rolando Gonzalez, discussed the food industry’s readiness regrading gap analysis and recordkeeping requirements under FSMA. Here, in the fourth, and final, portion of the series the trio will address how respondents to the survey feel regarding the resources necessary to implement FSMA. Finally, the group will address how the food industry feels, in general, about the Food Safety Modernization Act.

Jill: David, I’ll take us back to you. What resources or technology are being planned or have already been implemented?

David: This really comes down to, “Do you think you’ve got what it takes in terms of resources?” We’ve got almost half of the respondents saying, “Yes, we’re good. We’ve got enough people. We’ve got it covered.” We’ve got 13 percent saying, “We need to bring on more folk to do this,” and then 44 percent are unsure.

The majority, actually, are either not sure or they’ve already got plans to bring people on. That creates costs to do this, and I’m pretty certain, if you look at the economics that the FDA was thinking about when they put FSMA together and put the rules out, they weren’t anticipating that companies would need to hire new people to do this. I happen to think that, with some of the rules, some of the way it’s set, that may not be an accurate assessment. Obviously, to some extent, that’s true. But, this speaks to the fact that folks are still trying to figure out can we get this done with the resources we have.