(1888PressRelease)
October 17, 2009 - TORONTO, ON, - Since the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002 (the Bioterrorism Act), was signed into law June 12, 2002, companies that manufacture, process, pack, transport, distribute, receive, hold, or import food have been required to create and maintain records that are needed to identify the immediate previous sources and the immediate subsequent recipients of food. The FDA estimates the number of facilities required to comply with this Act to be approximately 420,000 worldwide.
Although Canadian food facilities are not regulated by the FDA, unless they are exporting food into the US, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), has its own set of regulations that are very similar to those of their southern counter-part, essentially requiring North America to keep track of food products from the time they are received to when and where they are distributed.
What has been a surprise to Food Decision Software Inc. (FDS) is that so many Distributors and Manufacturers have not taken this compliance seriously. In the informal surveys that we have conducted, more manufacturers than distributors have implemented any sort of “Food Recall Planning” process but the fact is still that not every food facility complies with these requirements.
When asked what they would do in the event of a food recall in their company, those that do not currently track their products say “it has never happened to us”. When pushed to answer, they respond by saying that they would “just recall the entire quantity of the specific product no matter if it was part of the recall or not”. They would “recall all the remaining quantities” because many of them do not have the ability to properly track where the products came from, where they were used, or where they were shipped to. If a food company is not using a solution that offers food traceability functionality, manually tracking products would be very labor intensive.
The overwhelming reason given by food companies why they did not have a Food Recall Plan in place is that although there is a lot of information out there regarding Food Recall Planning, it is only information and they still have to create their own plan.
Food Decision Software Inc. has solved this problem. As we realized the need for every company to have a Food Recall Plan, we have taken the applicable information from both the US and Canadian regulatory agencies and have recreated Food Recall Templates for both food distributors and manufacturers. Using these FREE templates and the associated guidelines, every distributor and manufacturer, with or without software to help them trace their products, can become compliant with the regulations set out by their own regulating agency. FDS has been given the approval by the various regulating agencies to use their information in regenerating and distributing the process and templates created.
To review the guidelines and templates compiled by Food Decision Software Inc. visit our website at www.fooddecisionsoftware.com and follow the links to the Food Recall Plan. You can also contact us at: foodrecall ( @ ) fooddecisionsoftware dot com or call us at: 905-889-6939 and we will be happy to send you the information dot
About Food Decision Software Inc.
For more than 31 years, Food Decision Software Inc. (FDS) has served the food industry under the banner Mulvany Attard Associates. Today FDS has customers across North America that use our WinFDS software to run their business and gain competitive advantage.
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