Eating Safely: Produce Should Be Good for You

Nationwide safety standards for fruit and vegetables could dramatically reduce food-borne illness.

Food-borne illnesses cause sickness, death, and substantial economic and social costs across the nation each year. One proposed preventive measure for reducing food-borne illness is to create mandatory safety standards for commodities such as produce.

In recognition of the growing support for mandatory produce safety standards, Booz Allen Hamilton and the Produce Safety Project—an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts at Georgetown University—sponsored the Produce Safety Summit on March 5, 2009.

The Summit brought together stakeholders with active interests in produce safety, including food producers and growers; academia; federal, state, and local governments; food retailers and manufacturers; and consumer and public health organizations.

To assess the potential implications of mandatory produce standards, the Summit features an interactive simulation. The report, “Produce Safety Summit: Implications of Mandatory Safety Standards,” provides an overview of that simulation, as well as insights emerging from the Summit about the challenges of standards implementation, compliance, and enforcement, which are applicable to many commodities.

Lessons learned from the Summit provided pragmatic suggestions for ways in which standards could be better crafted to be both implementable and enforceable for product and other commodities. Notably, the ability to remain adaptable and flexible to new approaches will help ensure standards continue to meet requirements over time.

Vice president Susan Penfield, principal Lucy Stribley, senior associate Mike Breck, and senior associate Nicole Weepie led the Booz Allen team that contributed to the report. The firm’s Produce Safety Project partners—Jim O’Hara, Sandra Eskin, and Erin Bongard—were instrumental in the success of the initiative.

study posted May 5, 2009