WHAT IS FSMA?

The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA of the FDA) a law issued by the President of the United States, Barack Obama, on January 04th, 2011. This regulated change had the aim to transform food safety. The industry shall use effective actions to prevent pollution instead of fighting it.

FSMA of the FDA has preventive controls for human and animal food, including specific requirements for food suppliers, foreign importers and identifies qualified individuals in preventive controls. It’s important for affected organizations by FSMA of FDA, as well as suppliers, be certified by the GFSI (as FSSC 22000 or BRC Global Standard) to ensure complying with FSMA requirements.

The principal elements of FSMA are:

Prevention

The FDA has for the first time a legislative mandate to demand wide preventive controls based on science and throughout the food chain.

Inspection and conformity

The FSMA acknowledges preventive control actions, improving the security of food it produces and procedures to comply with them. Therefore, the FDA must provide supervision, assuring conformity with requirements and effectively respond when issues arise.

Reply

FSMA recognizes the FDA shall hold tools to respond adequately to risen issues despite preventive controls.

Importation

FSMA provides unique authorization to the FDA for assuring imported products to attend the standards of the United States and safety for consumers.

Strengthened partnership

FSMA builds a formal system of collaboration with other national and international government institutions. In this way, the regulation explicitly acknowledges that every food safety agency shall work together in a sense to achieve public health aims.

Now, it’s important to keep security for the consumption of food, no matter where they are produced, either conventional or organic, or the size of the company, or if products are manufactured or processed. This is important since the food industry education shall be an important element of the successful implementation of this regulation. Although the food industry members are responsible to have the necessary training in FSMA, the FDA acknowledges the importance of facilitating education. The FSMA training includes several food industry members, either national and international food producers and importers. The FDA operates with partners around the world, including the opposing regulation party and multinational organizations in favor of the global community food suppliers.

The FDA is working with internal public and private partners for assuring programs, complying with FSMA’s new standards no matter the size, nature, or location.

It will take time and effort to work on this and to do it right. The FDA commits to ensuring every person related to the food supply chain knows the training resources, education, and a way to access them.