On August 13, 2014, the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued FSIS Notice 39-14 clarifying what product is to be sampled as beef manufacturing trimmings (under MT60 sampling code), and what product is to be sampled as bench trim (MT55). The notice cancels Notice 81-13. The notice also explains that product [...]
Today, August 5, 2014, the Food and Drug Administration's gluten-free labeling rule went into effect. Packaged foods labeled on or after today must comply with the requirements of the regulation. Pursuant to the regulation, gluten-free foods must contain less than 20 parts per million (ppm) gluten. Foods may be labeled “gluten-free” if they are inherently [...]
FDA is announcing the Domestic and Foreign Facility Reinspections, Failure to Comply with Recall Orders, and Certain Importer Reinspections User Fee Rates for Fiscal Year 2015. The fees are $217 per hour if domestic travel is required and $305 per hour if foreign travel is required. More information may be found in the FY 2015 Fee [...]
On July 25, 2014, the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture released a notice (35-14) to staff on on-going foreign equivalence verification audits. The notice provides the International Audit Staff (IAS), Office of Investigations, Enforcement, and Audit (OIEA), and the International Equivalence Staff (IES), Office of Policy and Program [...]
After a period of increased sampling and testing for species of products from Iceland, Ireland, Poland, the United Kingdom, and Northern Ireland, as well as beef trimmings from Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Honduras, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua and Uruguay, the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture has resumed normal sampling [...]
On July 23, 2014, Erik Lieberman of Lieberman PLLC moderated a panel at an event sponsored by the Food and Drug Law Institute. The event, entitled "Is the GRAS Process Broken?" explored the current functioning of the Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) process for substances in food and whether or not it is in need of modernization. Lieberman moderated the [...]
On July 16, 2014, the Food Safety and Inspection Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture released a proposed rule to require that all official establishments and retail stores that grind raw beef products must keep records that disclose the identity and contact information of the supplier of all source materials that they use in [...]
On December 20, 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration published a proposed regulation to implement the food defense sections of the Food Safety Modernization Act. The rule requires domestic and foreign facilities registered with FDA under the Bioterrorism Act to write and implement a food defense plan. There are a number of exemptions contained [...]
