Champaign IL – The American Meat Science Association (AMSA) is excited to announce that, Dr. Randy Huffman from Maple Leaf Foods; Janet Riley from American Meat Institute and Dr. Barbara Masters from Olsson, Frank, Weeda, Terman, and Matz Law Firm, will be the speakers in the AMSA 66th Reciprocal Meat Conference (RMC) Food Safety Symposium sponsored by Purac, on Monday, June 17. Presentations from these speakers will focus on the below topics:
1. Food Safety Performance Through HACCP: Regrets and Possibilities: People, regulation and technology are some of the factors that have and will continue to influence HACCP performance. From the early origin in 1971, HACCP was developed to provide safe food for astronauts in a simple, consistent and reliable way. Unfortunately, in many situations HACCP has evolved into a complex concept where key stakeholders have difficulty in executing the system reliably and with the simplicity and confidence that was originally intended. Requirements have crept in that lead to a “check the box” mentality that few would agree adds real food safety value. The future envisioned is a simple, reliable HACCP process that takes advantage of technology and builds on human behaviors and measurable performance excellence. Dr. Randy Huffman will explore perspectives on the evolution of HACCP in North America, and what the future could hold.
2. Consumer Food Safety Knowledge, Attitude and Behavior In a Sea of Choices and Claims: Consumers have more choices than ever before in the meat and poultry case, including organic, natural, humane certified products, uncured meats, local, simple, natural and products that make antibiotic and hormone claims. Janet Riley’s presentation will discuss media coverage, social media sites and activist groups that commonly tell the public that products bearing key claims are safer than others and how this background noise is leading to much consumer confusion, especially as they strive to make budget smart purchases. While many consumers perceive and overestimate risks from certain production and processing practices, they show little response to efforts to improve their basic safe
food handling behaviors, an area where changes in habits can yield real food safety benefits.
3. Food Safety, What’s next?: With the second term of the Obama Administration, we can expect on-going support for food safety initiatives at both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). The first demonstration of this was the FDA’s release of the first two proposed regulations as part of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) – Preventive Controls and Produce Safety. Dr. Barbara Masters’ presentation will discuss how the industry will be at varying stages of readiness to comply with these new FSMA regulations once they are finalized. Along with information on the FSIS release of their 2013 regulatory agenda, this suggests that the Agency will continue to issue regulations that have been on hold for some time, as well as work to modernize the poultry inspection system.
The AMSA 66th Reciprocal Meat Conference (RMC) will be held June 16-19, 2013, at Auburn University in Auburn, AL.
For more information regarding the AMSA 66th RMC please visit: http://www.meatscience.org/rmc or contact Deidrea Mabry 1-800-517-AMSA ext. 12 or dmabry@meatscience.org.
AMSA fosters community and professional development among individuals who create and apply science to efficiently provide safe and high quality meat (defined as red meat (beef, pork and lamb), poultry, fish/seafood and meat from other managed species
Source: The American Meat Science Association