The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Wednesday said it had completed the 2016 to 2020 White Paper on Food Safety that aims to apply cross-ministerial resources to probe food safety violations.
Since July last year the administration held meetings with specialists from various ministries and academics, referenced food safety management mechanisms and researched trends in other nations to formulate a comprehensive paper on food safety, FDA Deputy Director-General Chiang Yu-mei (姜郁美) said.
FDA Division of Food Safety official Cheng Wei-chih (鄭維智) said food scandals were mainly exposed through inspections conducted by local health departments, but the process takes a lot of time and resources, and can be like “searching for a needle in a haystack.”
With the establishment of the “Food Cloud” — a food traceability cloud application — and integrated food management information between central and local governments, the administration has a system of alerts prompting it to inspect companies suspected of violating food safety regulations, he said, adding that active inspections are to be conducted when data abnormalities are found.
Chiang said the administration had to work alone before the databases were integrated, but now the comprehensive database means ministry cooperation can be closer and inspections more effective.
Using the system, the administration investigated a company cited in the Environmental Protection Administration’s (EPA) waste food oil report system and the FDA’s food industry registration system for large amounts of waste oil treatment.
The administration investigated whether the waste oil had been recycled and returned to the nation’s food supply, she said.
Chiang said the administration can compare information on oil for animal feed from the Council of Agriculture with the administration’s system to know which companies possess both animal grade and food grade oil and investigate whether animal feed oil has been mixed with food oil.
“We absolutely will not loosen our inspection mechanism, but rather refine our management system with the cooperation between ministries,” Chiang said.
“Our goal is to create a safe food chain, ‘from farm to table,’ and build trust among consumers,” she said.
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