The easiest way to prevent recalls associated with refrigerated foods is to ensure you are continually producing safe, wholesome product that never needs to be recalled. Sounds easy, right? And yet, we continue to see recalls occur. In order to really understand how to prevent recalls, we need to delve into why they occur in the first place.
The idea of prevention is paramount to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). It’s clear that FDA expects that once a processor discovers that something has “gone wrong,” they go back and figure out exactly what happened so that they can put measures in place to prevent it from happening again. For USDA-regulated products, the HACCP approach employs a similar process. Prevention is key, and if your monitoring measures miss an issue that could compromise food safety, you need to go back and determine the root cause of the problem.