Food Traceability And Sanitation Certification

The Sanitary Cold Chain is designed to provide certification services needed to help truck, rail and other food transportation handlers.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has established reporting and record keeping administrative rules based on the new Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) and a variety of Department of Homeland and Customs and Border Protection laws. These new rules read in part:

"The FDA may establish requirements regarding establishment and maintenance, for not longer than 2 years, of records by persons (excluding farms and restaurants) who manufacture, process, pack, transport, distribute, receive, hold, or import food. The records that are required to be kept by these regulations are those needed by FDA for inspection to allow FDA to identify the immediate previous sources (one back) and immediate subsequent recipients (one up) of food."

The last sentence establishes audit and traceability record keeping and reporting requirements for control over any device (bins, trucks, pallets, trailers, containers, etc.) used to transport food due to the potential for adulteration during transportation.

While the FDA has yet to establish traceability and sanitation requirements for the food itself, they have now established such requirements for anything carrying food.

In response to such new directions and others to be established by the Food Safety Modernization Act, Dr. John Ryan, recently retired Quality Assurance administrator for the Hawaii State Department of Agriculture and president of Ryan Systems and Edgar Vargas, Salinas's Kleen Trans owner have formed a partnership to establish the Sanitary Cold Chain.

The Sanitary Cold Chain is designed to provide certification services needed to help truck, rail and other food transportation handlers establish HACCP plans and meet TransCert (Transportation Certification) sanitation and temperature control traceability reporting and record keeping requirements.

Ryan Systems and Kleen Trans have recently tested technologies and established transportation sanitation and traceability standards for food carrying devices.

TransCert standards provide guidance and a cold chain audit base line for food transporters. These technologies include: container interior wash and sanitation and testing, Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and other sensor enabled temperature and humidity monitoring technologies.

In order to meet TransCert transporter certification requirements, the Sanitary Cold Chain provides training and certification audit services for truck and container interior washout stations, wash and sanitation test personnel, truck fleets, freight forwarders & cargo handlers, container suppliers, reefer and trailer owners and users and companies that ship and handle food under sanitary and temperature controlled conditions.

Latest