Packagers’ response to FSMA poll previewed

What has been the effect of FSMA on brand owners and their packaging operations? Were capital expenditures made or were there staffing adjustments? A check of our live poll sheds some light on the impact.

As part of the Food Safety Modernization Act, the Preventive Controls for Human Food rule and Preventive Controls for Animal Food rule are now final, and compliance dates for some businesses begin in September 2016, according to the FDA.gov website. And according to the news released Sept. 10, “the preventive controls final rules announced today are the result of an extensive outreach effort, and incorporate thousands of public comments, including valuable input from farmers, consumers, the food industry and academic experts, to create a flexible and targeted approach to ensuring food safety.”

That makes the timing good to share some results from our FSMA poll before we close it later this week (you can still take the poll using the link at bottom), a poll thatPackaging Digest conducted to gauge the impact the legislation is having on the packaging industry.

While we’ve asked a number of questions that will be revealed when we report on the poll more in-depth next month, one in particular gets to the heart of the matter: What has been your company’s response to FSMA?

The results can be seen above, which were roughly split between capital expenditures (we drill down into that in a follow-up question within the poll) and making changes in procedures. Most apparent, though, was that 100% of these companies either added to or changed their training.