The Defender Pro line of products have been designed to solve multiple odor challenges that pest management professionals face when servicing both commercial and residential properties.

Auto-San, a leader in health care, hospitality and property management odor control products is introducing its line of Defender Pro products to the pest control industry. The Defender Pro line of products can solve multiple odor challenges that pest management professionals face when servicing both commercial and residential properties. 

Defender Pro hanging socks  are specifically designed to neutralize odors in sewers, elevator shafts, dumpster areas, garbage collection areas, industrial plants, water treatment facilities and other locations where strong undesirable odors are present.

Defender Pro odor counteract granules are formulated to handle the toughest odors from restaurant, institutional, commercial and municipal waste, effectively counteracting malodors in a vast array of locations.

Defender Pro Predator Is formulated to neutralize and treat organic malodors, Predator Cleaning is safe to use around people, pets and on surfaces not harmed by water, and is laboratory certified salmonella/shigella free, Auto-San reports. It meets USDA requirements for use in federally inspected meat and poultry plants, the company reports. Predator can be used anywhere urine, fecal matter, mold, mildew or any other odor causing organic matter may be found.

Learn more at www.auto-san.com or call 901/240-8776.

The Weighted Landscape iQ tray fits inside existing Weighted Landscape bait stations, for discrete rodent monitoring, and works with either rodenticide or rat snap traps.

WINDSOR, WIS. – Bell Laboratories announces that the Weighted Landscape iQ rodent monitoring bait station tray is now available.

The Weighted Landscape iQ tray fits inside existing Weighted Landscape bait stations, for discrete rodent monitoring, and works with either rodenticide or rat snap traps. iQ products capture and provide PMPs important previously unknown rodent data, giving service specialists the time they need to conduct superior rodent control service, instead of checking empty traps.

The Weighted Landscape iQ tray joins the full iQ line-up of rodent devices with sensors, including Express iQ bait station tray, T-Rex iQ rat trap, 24/7 iQ multiple catch mouse trap, Pulse Rat iQ station and Pulse Mouse iQ station. iQ products have fully integrated, weatherproof rodent sensors, batteries, and Bluetooth® antennae.

“Electronic rodent monitoring is both the present and future of rodent control. With the release of our sixth iQ product, Bell underscores that belief to our distributor and PMP partners,” said Patrick Lynch, senior vice president of sales, Bell Laboratories.

iQ products also provide PMPs with the first scalable rodent monitoring system that utilizes the same products currently used in their everyday rodent control service. 

Other sessions included one on how food industry students can navigate life during and after graduate school, and one on data sharing.

Editor's Note: QA staff are on the ground in Pittsburgh for this year's IAFP 2022. Follow us on Twitter for live updates.

PITTSBURGH, Pa. — Day 3 of IAFP 2022 was all about interesting sessions that involved a wide range of food industry topics and how they deal with food safety and quality. 

At the session Virtual Food Safety Monitoring, Auditing and Artificial Intelligence Applications, Rob Chester, CEO of Ubloquity, discussed how blockchain and other technologies can drive efficiency in companies while maintaining virtual control of safety, quality, traceability authenticity and carbon footprint.

Chester said he thinks that in the future, blockchain will transform how supply chains operate.

“The outcomes from building a transparent and real-time supply chain are obviously numerous,” he said. “Much greater visibility, better tracking and traceability, payment times can be improved, delivery progress is easier to monitor and react to, and that will reduce operational costs.”

In an afternoon session in the main ballroom, Yanyan Huang, ADM, Kurt E. Westmoreland, FlexXray, and David D. Rasmussen, Kraft Heinz Corporation, discussed the food safety challenges with plant-based or novel food products. With the boom in demand for these products, all three speakers reinforced the importance of keeping them safe. 

Discussing the ingredients that go into novel foods, Huang talked about the importance of understanding how you're using the ingredients. For example, she said, tumeric can be a coloring or flavoring agent, a supplement and more. Each way you use it can have different food safety challenges. She also said the form you use of the ingredient can present different challenges — using something fresh, as an extract or as a concentrate will have different risks. 

Kurt Westmoreland of FlexXray, which provides foreign material inspection services, cautioned on the challenges plant-based foods might cause when developing a HAACP plan. Routine HACCP plans in plant-based manufacturing facilities typically include microbiological and/or chemical verification processes and systems, he said.

To wrap up the session, Rasmussen reminded attendees that if you’re using a co-packer for your novel food product, do you know what else they make? “They might do hamburgers and you want them to do your new plant-based burger,” he said. “Remember, this is not your facility and you can’t be there everyday.”

Two late afternoon sessions included discussions on data sharing and what it's like to be a food industry student during and after graduate school.  

In a discussion that was lively and funny but also included frank discussions of mental health and self care, David A. Buckley, Diversey, Suzy Hammons, USDA-FSIS, Tia Glave, Catalyst, LLC, and Chip S. Manuel, GOJO Industries, Inc., offered advice on life after graduate school and beyond academia.

“What one skill would have biggest impact on a career?” a student audience member asked the group.

“Leadership skills. How do you influence others? … Those leadership skills are key. Think about strategy and influence and communicating with non-technical stakeholders,” said Glave.

Another student asked: How do you negotiate for yourself when it comes to salary and work-life balance?

“Be more diverse than just the salary number. … And advocate early. Find allies in an organization and build support,” said Hammons.

In a meeting room next door, there was roundtable discussion called Public-Private Data Sharing: A New Opportunity for Risk-Based Decision Making in Food Safety.

The No. 1 barrier to data-sharing is trust, Kelly Stevens of General Mills told the attendees. 

“There’s unintended consequences of data being shared out of scope,” she said, adding that data must be shared with the appropriate context to offer insight and meaning.

To improve data sharing, the industry needs to invest in what Dr. Barbara Kowalcyk, Ohio State University professor, calls “translational data scientists”: people who understand both data analytics and food safety, which she said is rare.

The solution is investing in educational programs to train for these roles, she said.

The second day of the International Association for Food Protection's event included major news from USDA that it would be declaring Salmonella an adulterant in breaded and stuffed raw chicken products.

Editor's Note: QA staff are on the ground in Pittsburgh for this year's IAFP 2022. Follow us on Twitter for live updates.

PITTSBURGH, Pa. — Day 2, the first full day of sessions at IAFP 2022, kicked off with morning sessions that included one on hygienic design of food processing facilities and equipment.

At the session Food Safety by Design, Dimitri Tavernarakis of Mondelez International talked about the inherent cost savings that come from businesses investing in hygienic design, including better productivity and efficiency on the facility floor and equipment reliability.

“Complacency is not OK when it comes to food safety,” Gale Prince, SAGE Food Safety Consultants, said at the session.

After lunch, Frank Yiannas, deputy commissioner for food policy and response, Food & Drug Administration (FDA), and Sanra Eskin, deputy under secretary for food safety, Department of Agriculture (USDA), gave attendees an update of what their agencies are up to.

The update, an annual event, kicked off with info from Eskin that USDA was announcing action to declare Salmonella an adulterant in breaded and stuffed raw chicken products. 

These include products typically sold in a grocery freezer section stuffed with meat, cheese or a vegetable component, such as frozen chicken cordon bleu.

Since 1998, FSIS and public health partners have investigated 14 salmonella outbreaks potentially associated with these products, which Eskin said often appear to be cooked, but are in fact raw.

“We have consistently failed to meet our public health goals for reducing salmonella infections, so it’s time for a change,” she said.

Eskin said FSIS is developing a comprehensive strategy that will focus on salmonella controls as chickens enter slaughter and processing establishments.

Following Eskin, Yiannas used his time to talk about the future of the food industry and some of the challenges it faces.

“These are challenging times in our nation and the world as the food system faces unprecedented challenges," he said. "But with challenges come opportunities.”

Citing new food products and methods of delivery, Yiannas said there's a food revolution going on, but there's room for food safety to improve through things such as data collection and sharing. 

“Imagine a future in which all the info we need about food is at our fingertips,” Yiannas said.

In a moment that got an uneasy chuckle from the crowd, Yiannas somewhat rhetorically asked the audience: “Are we wining the battle against foodborne disease?”

To which Eskin, who was still on stage from the proceeding Q&A session, chimed in: "Not really."

During the Q&A session, an audience member asked Yiannas about a plan for providing better, more clear safe food handling instructions to consumers.

“It has to be more than a label," Yiannas said. "Consumers don’t pay attention to labels too much. It has to go much further."

Another question, in response to Yiannas' mention of the need for better data, someone in the crowd asked how agencies can influence tech to get involved in food safety when it comes to data?”

“You name the tech firm, I’m having conversations with them,” Yiannas said in an interesting tease.

Afternoon sessions included a discussion on using consumer research to inform labeling policy for food products. Speakers such as Aaron Lavallee, USDA – FSIS, Lisa A. Shelley, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, N.C., and Donna M. Garren, American Frozen Food Institute, Woodbridge, Va., talked about how consumers interact with labels, and how that can help industry and agencies make them better. 

Lavallee, in a Do you remember when? moment, shared a photo of his pager to illustrate a larger point about communicating effectively. 

"We've just changed how we communicate [since the time of pagers]," he said. "There hasn't been a point in history where we've had more information at our fingertips. So how do you break through that?"

At the session Where the Wild Things Are: Foraging for Fungi Food Safety, Laura Gieraltowski of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention outlined recent multi-state outbreaks related to fresh or dried mushrooms, including a listeria outbreak in 2017-18.

Dr. Florence Wu of Aemtek discussed the popularity of foraging and the specialty mushroom industry. Mushroom poisoning causes nearly 1,400 emergency hospital visits every year in the U.S., Wu said. Poisonous mushrooms remind her of a Taylor Swift lyric, she quipped: “Darling, I’m a nightmare dressed as a daydream.”

“There are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old and bold mushroom hunters,” Wu added.

During the session Hold the Phone! The Role of Celebrity Chefs and Influencers in Food Safety Messaging, a roundtable weighed the pros and cons of food influencers going viral on platforms like TikTok and Instagram from a food safety perspective. Nicole L. Arnold, a nutrition science professor at East Carolina University, gave the example of a new, concerning trend: submerging avocados in jars of water for months at a time in an attempt to preserve their shelf life. Cheetie Kumar, a chef in Raleigh, N.C., said seeing these trends is “like watching a car wreck.”

Ellen W. Evans of ZERO2FIVE Food Industry Centre said the issue with short-form reels on Instagram and TikTok is “there’s certainly no time for people to include information on food safety.”

Arnold added that food safety professionals have to be ready to take the heat if they call an influencer out online, both from the influencer and their devoted fan base.

“They are profiting off of misinformation, and they’re making a lot of money doing it,” Arnold said. “And we’re a threat to that.”

Speaking of TikTok trends intersecting with food safety, QA advisory board members and frequent contributor Darin Detwiler, stopped by the QA booth in the exhibit hall to talk about the Pink Sauce viral trend and more. Check out the full interview!

The event will begin with lunch and a welcome from Dr. Mark Frascatore, dean of the Holzschuh College of Business Administration.

NIAGARA UNIVERSITY, N.Y. — Speakers across the retail food and service sectors will share their insights on re-imagining a pathway to growth and innovation at the 2022 Niagara University Food Marketing Center of Excellence Summit, Wed., Sept. 21, 2022, beginning at 11:45 a.m. The event will begin with lunch and a welcome from Dr. Mark Frascatore, dean of the Holzschuh College of Business Administration. It will be held at the Hyatt Regency Buffalo, 2 Fountain Plaza, Buffalo, N.Y.

Bill Chiodo, president at Affinity Group Retail and chair of the Food Marketing Center’s advisory board, will provide opening remarks.

Jeff Metzger, president of Best-Met Publishing Co., will moderate an executive panel discussion with the following panelists: