Fuchs Attends ASTA Regulatory Workshop
On October 3rd, Fuchs QA Manager, Mark Richardson attended the American Spice Trade Association’s annual Regulatory Workshop. Fuchs is a long time member of ASTA and attends meetings regularly. In this year’s meeting we reviewed current status of Poppy Seed legislation, obtained insights on an upcoming FDA guidance document regarding definition of Ready to Eat (RTE) foods, and had a panel discussion on the validation of spice processes for salmonella control.
The panel was an exciting discussion of surrogate groupings research, including ASTA’s own published research on the use of Enterococcus faecium as a surrogate for Salmonella in validation studies for spices. Food companies are required to validate pathogen reduction processes under the Preventive Controls for Human Food rule for FSMA.
Fuchs North America has an in-house Ethylene Oxide (EtO) treatment chamber that is used to control microorganisms in our spices, except for basil. The Fuchs EtO treatment chamber has been validated by a Novolyze E. faecium Biological Surrogate study to achieve a 10^6 log reduction.
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