Third Party Audits

  • Broken links in food-safety chain hid peanut plants' risks

    Posted: April 27th, 2009 - 8:41am by Doug Powell

    Julie Schmit of USA Today has written another excellent overview documenting the multiple failures – bad inspections, bad audits, bad people -- that led to the peanut paste crapola that sickened 700 and killed nine.

    Below are just a few of the highlights:

    •Deibel Labs, which ran more than 1,600 salmonella tests for PCA's Blakely plant from 2004 through 2008, found almost 6% positive. It was so many that Deibel sent PCA's samples to a separate part of its Chicago lab to lessen chances that they'd contaminate other products, Charles Deibel, the firm's president, said in an interview. For roasted products such as peanuts, a positive rate above 1 in 10,000 would be high, Deibel said. Proper roasting kills salmonella with heat. PCA never asked Deibel to look into the issue, Deibel said.

    •Nestlé audited the Blakely plant in 2002 and rejected it as a supplier. Nestlé's audit report said the plant needed a "better understanding of the concept of deep cleaning" and failed to adequately separate unroasted raw peanuts from roasted ones. Having them in the same area could allow bacteria on raw nuts to contaminate roasted ones, a risk known as cross-contamination. The plant wasn't even close to Nestlé's standards, auditor Richard Hutson said in an interview. Hutson, who now heads quality assurance for several Nestlé divisions, said he shared his concerns with PCA officials at the time, but "they didn't pursue it" further with Nestlé, he says.

    • To win customers, Parnell "extolled" the fact that an auditor, AIB International, had rated the plant as "superior," said King Nut CEO Martin Kanan at a congressional hearing. King Nut sold peanut butter under its name that was made by PCA. That rating also satisfied Kellogg, which began buying PCA's peanut paste for sandwich crackers in 2007.

    • AIB also draws criticism from a former food-industry official. Its audit of PCA was "superficial," said Jim Lugg, former food-safety chief for bagged salad maker Fresh Express, who reviewed AIB's audit of PCA at USA TODAY's request. One example of "shallow treatment of a big issue," Lugg says, is that the audit notes that PCA had a written program to evaluate suppliers and had an approved list. But AIB did no further checking of the suppliers. Years ago, Fresh Express stopped using AIB audits because it found them inadequate, he adds.
     

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  • Audits do not enhance food safety culture

    Posted: April 14th, 2009 - 8:38am by Doug Powell

    “After the PCA (Peanut Corporation of America) plant, you had all the employees saying [the PCA facility] was a dump. It would have been nice for them to say that before nine people died.”

    That’s what I told a student reporter for the Kansas State Collegian in this morning’s issue.

    The reporter, Tyler Sharp, has been working on a story about Manhattan’s own American Institute of Baking, the auditor at the center of the PCA Salmonella fiasco, for weeks, and had trouble finding anyone to talk. After a March 6, 2009 article in the N.Y. Times sorta shattered the myth of third-party food safety audits, Tyler figured the homegrown story would be a no-brainer. Except he couldn’t get anyone to talk.

    Since the release of the Times article, AIB now requires a minimum of two days or longer to complete an inspection at a food processing facility. AIB has also announced it will change the name of its Good Manufacturing Practices inspection certificates from “Certificate of Achievement” to “Recognition of Achievement.”

    Is that like Homer Simpson winning the First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence?

    I told Tyler, the reporter,

    “Third-party food audits, like restaurant inspection, are a snapshot in time. They are not indicative of what happens day in and day out. It doesn’t really tell you much. There are some audits that are OK. It depends on the auditor. My concern is that — and I have done a lot of work with farmers and producers and companies — what you really want is to help people become better with food safety, whereas an audit is just a checklist that penalizes people. That doesn’t necessarily help people get better with food safety.”

    The third-party food safety audit scheme that processors and retailers insisted upon is no better than a financial Ponzi scheme. The vast number of facilities and suppliers means audits are required, but people have been replaced by paper. Audits, inspections, training and systems are no substitute for developing a strong food safety culture, farm-to-fork, and marketing food safety directly to consumers rather than the local/natural/organic hucksterism is a way to further reinforce the food safety culture.

    Costco, a retail store, which previously limited AIB’s inspections to its bakery vendors, has now instructed suppliers to not use AIB at all.

    “The American Institute of Baking is bakery experts,” said R. Craig Wilson, the top safety official at Costco. “But you stick them in a peanut butter plant or in a beef plant, they are stuffed.”

    Or as Mansour Samadpour of Seattle says,

    “The contributions of third-party audits to food safety is the same as the contribution of mail-order diploma mills to education.”

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  • Finally, a focus on the 'fallacy' of food safety audits

    Posted: February 5th, 2009 - 4:53am by Doug Powell

    “They called me crazy at Masters and Johnson. But I’ll show them.”
    The demented Dr. Bernardo from Woody Allen’s 1972 film, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask).

    A week ago I asked, with all the recalled products related to Samonella in peanut paste, what problems did the third-party auditors uncover and what was done about such problems?

    A few weeks ago, Chapman and I wrote that,

    Third-party audits are an incomplete form of verification that provide a limited view of a producer’s facilities and documentation but do not effectively reduce risk. …At some point, folks will figure out that all these outbreaks of foodborne illness – like Salmonella in peanut butter – happened at places that passed so-called independent audits.

    Ten years ago, I told the Ontario greenhouse tomato growers they should have their own in-house food safety expertise to help farmers produce safe product and to market the program, with test results, to buyers and consumers.

    They said I was crazy.

    This morning, the N.Y. Times and USA Today are reporting that Peanut Corporation of America, the Blakely, GA firm at the epicenter of the Salmonella shit storm, had “regular visits and inspections” of its Blakely, Ga., plant in 2008, not only by federal and state regulators but by independent auditors and food safety companies that made “customary unannounced inspections.”

    Kellogg's auditor, the American Institute of Baking checked out Peanut Corp. of America's Blakely, Ga., plant in 2007 and 2008 and gave it superior ratings both times.

    "That's frightening," says Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia.

    Andrew Martin of the Times writes that,

    Peanut Corporation of America’s statement was released as food manufacturers and public health officials tried to determine how so many inspectors missed what some have said were obvious problems at the plant, including improper sanitation procedures, live roaches, mold and slimy residue on floors and equipment.

    Kris Charles, a spokeswoman for Kellogg, said,

    Had Kellogg known of the problems at the plant that the Food and Drug Administration detailed recently, “we would have discontinued the relationship with P.C.A. immediately and would not have accepted any ingredients from them.”

    Jim Munyon, president of AIB International, based in Manhattan, Kan., said the company would not have received a superior rating if his auditors had seen the filth the federal government described.

    “It would mean that we didn’t see it on the day we were there. What goes on the rest of the time, we don’t know.”

    He did say that AIB wouldn't see internal test results unless PCA shared them. "They show us only what they want to show us," he says.

    Doug Powell, an associate professor of food safety at Kansas State University, said the salmonella outbreak at Peanut Corporation of America showed the “fallacy” of independent audits, which are commonly used to verify food safety, animal welfare claims and organic production methods. While the intent might be good, he said, the results are usually withheld from the public.

    “Companies say they do all this testing. Great. Show us the data. They won’t. Given all the outbreaks, why should we believe them?”
     

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  • Third-party audits sorta suck

    Posted: January 21st, 2009 - 6:48am by Doug Powell

    I’ve never been a fan of third-party audits.

    As Ben and I wrote a few years ago,

    “On-farm food safety cannot be just a set of formulaic guidelines; rather, it must be specific to an agricultural site to make it work, as suggested by Rangarajan et al (2002). A one-size-fits-all approach will not work, as the individual producer has many different priorities at any given time during the growing season. Participation of stakeholders has been identified as a missing component in all reviewed programmes. Further, third-party audits are an incomplete form of verification that provide a limited view of a producer’s facilities and documentation but do not effectively reduce risk. Audits are analagous to restaurant inspections, a snapshot of a business’s operating procedures and a visual inspection of facilities. It has been suggested that inspection scores for restaurants are subject to inspector inconsistencies and are not  predictive of the likelihood of an outbreak (Cruz et al, 2001; Jones et al 2004). This is likely to be true for producer third-party audits as well.”

    At some point, folks will figure out that all these outbreaks of foodborne illness – like Salmonella in peanut butter – happened at places that passed so-called independent audits.

    As Abraham Mahshie of The Packer wrote last week,

    Increasingly, industry officials are calling for a regulatory benchmark that would create science-based food safety standards for third-party auditors. The result, they say, will be a sharp reduction in the cost of third-party audits that are at times repetitive and arbitrary measures of food safety.

    “To me, the real issue in the certification, validation, etc. is there is no real scientific basis,” said Robert Buchanan, director of the Center for Food Systems Safety & Security, College Park, Md. “It hasn’t really been worked out to say, ‘these are the key steps that need to be controlled, or need to be achieved.’” …

    He said that global GAP certifications, for example, in his opinion do not certify products for safety. … Buchanan said, in many cases, the third-party auditors are not transparent enough for the scientific community to survey and critically analyze what they are actually measuring.

    I said that 10 years ago.

    Paul Medeiros, food safety consulting manager for Guelph Food Technology Centre, Guelph, Ontario, said in Canada, many growers and government officials are debating how the standards for food safety should be set and who should provide the oversight once standards are in place.

    That may keep a bunch of government and grower-types employed – does nothing for food safety.

    Focus on what is going to result in fewer sick people.

    Powell DA and Chapman BJ: Fresh Threat: What's lurking in your salad bowl? J Sci Food Agric 87:1799 – 1801 (2007)

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