Consumer complaints in 2020 included hair in foods, glass in soup and insects and rodent droppings in products, according to the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI). In total, 2,772 grievances were handled by the FSAI’s advice line this past year, with 34 percent relating to unfit food and 30 percent to poor hygiene standards. This was a decrease on the 3,460 complaints in 2019. The reduction largely reflects the impact of COVID-19, where many…

For the past quarter-century, USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has run two options for inspecting hogs. The HACCP-based Inspection Model Project or HIMP evolved into the New Swine   Inspection System or NSIS pilot in 2014. And HIMP, or NSIS,  have grown up alongside traditional hog inspection protocols used for decades. The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) produced HIMP as a more flexible, more efficient, fully integrated inspection system for meat and poultry. “The HIMP system,…

Many European countries are struggling to perform all their planned checks on businesses because of resource issues, according to a report. The analysis covers national and EU Commission controls during 2017 and 2018 on food and feed law, animal health and welfare, plant health and protection products, organic farming and quality schemes. Findings are from before the Official Controls Regulation (OCR) came into force in December 2019. Official controls are done by authorities in EU countries to verify…

The U.S. Department of Agriculture hasn’t found any evidence that someone was deliberately trying to cause harm with unsolicited seed deliveries, according to an investigation report. The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) evaluated thousands of reports of seed deliveries from all 50 states that began in July 2020. Many of the seeds were for human food. APHIS found some of the seeds were sent to the United States unsolicited but others were ordered…

Editor’s note: The Food and Drug Administration uses import alerts to enforce U.S. food safety regulations for food from foreign countries. The agency updates and modifies the alerts as needed. Recent modifications to FDA’s import alerts, as posted by the agency, are listed below. Click on the table to go to the FDA page with links for specific details about various alert modifications. Click on the table to go to the FDA page with links…

Chino, CA-based GLG Trading Inc. late Monday recalled almost 97,000 pounds of beef tallow products that were imported from the People’s Republic of China, an ineligible country for beef, without the benefit of FSIS import re-inspection, USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) said. The following heat-treated shelf-stable Hotpot Seasoning items containing beef tallow are subject to recall: 17.6-oz. vacuum-sealed packages of “Ming Yang Hotpot Seasoning (Slightly spicy).” 17.6-oz. vacuum-sealed packages of “Ming Yang Hotpot…

There is no credible evidence of food or food packaging associated with or as a likely source of viral transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus causing COVID-19,  according to the Department of Agriculture , the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Acting USDA Secretary Kevin Shea and Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, M.D., issued a statement that takes exception to China’s latest contention…