The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced it will hold a public meeting on October 21, 2019 to discuss the “New Era of Food Safety.” FDA is exploring new and emerging technology to assess risks and prioritize resources, while creating a digital, traceable, and safer system. The agency’s initial focus areas are traceability, smarter tools and approaches for prevention, the challenges of new business models and retail food safety, and support for the development of food safety cultures.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently released guidance to assist food and dietary supplement companies on how to convert the previous units of measure for folate, niacin, vitamin A, vitamin D, and vitamin E to the new units required on the updated Nutrition Facts and Supplement Facts labels.  The guidance includes step by step instructions, conversion factors for each nutrient, and sample calculations for converting to the new units of measure.

Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a proposed rule that would require health warnings on cigarette packages and advertising.  The warnings include color images depicting some of the lesser-known health risks of cigarette smoking.  This is FDA’s second attempt to require graphic warnings for cigarette packages and advertisements.

On July 30, 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued its first Warning Letter to an importer for violations of the Foreign Supplier Verification Program (FSVP) requirements at  21 C.F.R. Part 1, Subpart L (21 C.F.R. §§ 1.500 through 1.514).  The Warning Letter was issued to a U.S. importer related to imported tahini implicated in a multi-state Salmonella Concord outbreak in spring 2019.

We are approximately nine months into FDA’s animal feed and pet food facility inspections for compliance with the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) Preventive Controls for Animal Food (PC) rule. With PC inspections starting for small businesses this Fall, there are a few lessons we have learned from the inspections that have occurred to date.

On June 7, 2019, the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) announced that it has adopted a final regulation eliminating the requirement for coffee to carry a Proposition 65 warning label. The regulation overturns a California State Court decision that found that coffee retailers failed to prove that the chemicals present in coffee, such as acrylamide, pose no significant risk of harm, requiring coffee to bear a warning.  

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently issued a draft guidance to advise food manufacturers of its intent to exercise enforcement discretion for the name “potassium chloride salt” in the ingredient statement on food labels as an alternative to the common or usual name “potassium chloride.” Potassium chloride is often used as a partial substitute for sodium chloride (i.e. salt) in many foods.