Meat + Poultry - December 2015 - 55

"The government is still actively working to
set in place a Salmonella parts prevalence level
at about 15.4 percent," says Ira Brill, Foster
Farms' director of communications. "And we
have been and are committed to remaining at
a prevalence level for broilers that is under 5
percent at the parts level."
Brill believes Foster Farms is
the safest poultry processor in the
US. "We have come an enormous
distance," he says.
Robert O'Connor, senior vice
president of technical services at
Foster Farms, has guided the food
safety turnaround, but considers it
a consummate team effort.
"Whether you're talking about
breeder operations, processing
plants and beyond...you have to
consider all of the people in the
company who have weathered
the negative press and uneasy
customers," he says. "They were
on the front line, too, just in a
different way. I always tell people
that this was really a team effort."
One thing O'Connor will never
forget is the intense regulatory
pressure of having three processing
plants under a Notice of Intended
Enforcement (NOIE) imposed by
the US Dept. of Agriculture.
"Daily life in the plant changes
when you're under a Notice of
Intended Enforcement. There
is intensified scrutiny and
inspection. You really have to be
on your game," says O'Connor,
who has worked at Foster Farms
for 17 years.

"If you get a call from government
regulators or the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention and they say, 'We are
attributing a food safety outbreak to you.'
Unless you have gathered a lot of data prior
to that, that call can come as a real surprise,"
O'Connor says. "And you really don't want to

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IT'S ALL ABOUT THE DATA
While Foster Farms has
implemented a multi-hurdle
intervention program to detect
Salmonella, O'Connor says the key
to the success of the food safety
program is gathering, analyzing and
implementing decisions based on
data. Two years ago, Foster Farms
didn't have the elaborate program
it has in place now to collect data
to determine food safety risks.

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Meat + Poultry - December 2015

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