Novel food technologies continue to emerge, but some become widely accepted by consumers while others languish in perception purgatory or die out altogether. In two papers, Lehman College Assistant Professor Joseph Mohorcich looks at the choices and strategies that can hasten or hurt the adoption of novel food technologies. The first, “What can the adoption of GM foods teach us about the adoption of other food technologies?” (https://bit.ly/3eQiOgy) focuses on genetically modified (GM) foods in general. The second, “Cell-cultured meat: Lessons from GMO adoption and resistance,” published in Appetite (https://bit.ly/31CewFP), is a peer-reviewed, updated version zeroing in on cell-cultured meat.

Both papers exam how GM food became an object of controversy in the US and EU. Included among the findings were: perceptions of food companies as secretive and aggressive damaged GM food adoption; genetic engineering firms understood their work to be humanitarian and environmentally friendly and so were unprepared for popular backlash; technology adoption is more readily affected by consumer activism when buyers exert more pressure on sellers than the reverse; and focusing on the positive aspects of a technology is more successful for encouraging its adoption than responding to negative perceptions.

To provide food producers seeking to introduce new food technologies with further insights and recommendations, QA discussed the findings with Mohorcich.

QA. In your paper, you state that adoption of GMOs has been damaged by their being “riddled with controversy for five decades” and consumer perception of companies as “secretive and aggressive.” What can companies do to change this perception?

Mohorcich. Well, they can be less secretive and aggressive. That perception didn’t come from thin air; Monsanto in particular expanded aggressively into European markets in the 1990s in a way that was probably detrimental to GM food as a whole.

QA. With opposition to technology seeming to rise in conjunction with press coverage and increased awareness, how does a company communicate so as to not appear secretive?

Mohorcich. Firms should consider proactively differentiating their products from conventional versions rather than waiting for the public and lawmakers to get scared and force them to, for example. Be wary of a patent-and-lawsuit approach to intellectual property; this worsened perceptions of secrecy for GM producers.

QA. You also state, “Focusing on the positive aspects of a technology has been more successful for encouraging its adoption than focusing on responding to negative perceptions.” So, should a company focus on food safety which inherently responds to the negative?

Mohorcich. It depends how food safety is framed. But, yes, an overwhelming focus on food safety is likely to make people ask, “Wait, is something unsafe about this?” Conventional meat, for example, is one of the most contaminant-prone things a human can eat, but meat ads focus on quality, taste, nutrition, etc., not about how they’ve implemented a new system that makes fecal contamination 85% less likely.

To be clear, as a technical question of resources and manufacturing, cell-cultured food companies should be obsessive about food safety, because the stakes of a contamination or safety breach for them are higher than they are for established foods. But as a public messaging strategy, the evidence suggests that talking a lot about food safety is not effective, in part because it simply makes more people worry about the safety of your products.

QA. GM “products for direct human consumption were much more likely to be dropped than products intended for processing or animal consumption.” What does this mean for the food industry?

Mohorcich. People are sensitive about things they put in their own bodies. But they don’t care as much about the things that the cows and pigs eat that they’re going to eat. So, if you’re going to develop products for humans to eat, you have to be more careful than you otherwise would.

QA. How does Europe’s stance against GM crops impact the US? The world?

Mohorcich. It hampers the spread of GM food and GM development generally. The EU is about 16% of the world economy, and the global food system is fairly interconnected, which means if one region bans GM ingredients, anyone growing GM crops can’t sell to anyone in that region, or to anyone who sells to anyone in that region, and so on. Also, other regulatory systems in other regions take their cues from Europe (among other places). So there exists a perception that the Europeans have, in their wisdom, banned GM ingredients for a good reason. We don’t want to lag behind, so perhaps we should ban GM ingredients too.

The US specifically isn’t as affected because its regulatory stance has been quite different, but it is indirectly affected because of who can sell to whom and because a European moratorium on GM crops means the incentives to develop new GM foods are reduced.

QA. In the paper, you state, “It seems likely that technologies with large, obvious benefits are more likely to be adopted and less likely to face backlash.” But you add that that’s not necessarily the case. Discuss this.

Mohorcich. This point is mostly intuitive: stuff that’s immensely helpful and for which there are no substitutes — think antibiotics, for example — can overcome concerns about unnaturalness by virtue of being so useful. But this isn’t an ironclad law: vaccines, which are hugely useful but also have faced various sorts of backlash from their inception, are an obvious counterexample. So, on balance, having obvious benefits can help your product achieve acceptance, but relying on it as though it guarantees acceptance is unwise.

QA. Consumers are more driven by “acceptability” than by science. What does this mean to a company developing or implementing new food technology?

Mohorcich. Many think in terms of acceptability rather than risk-reward balancing. This means, among other things, that the technical facts about a product’s usefulness or safety create background conditions for acceptance rather than guaranteeing it. Underlying facts matter, and can influence the way something is framed, but ultimately the framing of a product or issue matters more for public acceptance. 

QA. How do the findings of your study impact the adoption of today’s, and tomorrow’s, new food technologies?

Mohorcich. The Appetite article has about 11 concrete findings, but the short version is:

• If you’re a food producer, don’t assume your good intentions are durable or convincing.
• Sometimes targeted regulation can ease fears and improve, rather than hamper, prospects for adoption.
• Historically, neither apocalyptic nor utopian predictions for a new technology virtually ever turn out to be true. (You can practically count the counterexamples on one hand: penicillin, nuclear weapons, the MOS transistor.) So, if someone in your organization is talking endlessly about how you’re going to radically change all calorie delivery forever, you should mentally divide their predictions by 100 or so.
• Supply chain structures influence adoption in invisible ways. For example, a supply chain in which sellers are more susceptible to pressure from buyers than the reverse means that resistance to a food technology can travel “up” a supply chain, from consumers to retailers to distributors to producers, as it did with GM food in Europe. (For the full list, see Findings and Recommendations in the Appetite article.)

QA. What are the greatest obstacles faced by companies in furthering new food technologies?

QA. What, if anything, has the COVID-19 pandemic brought out about in new technologies and consumer perception?

Mohorcich. It’s too early to say. It seems cataclysmic events like pandemics both crystalize and confuse the stakes of a technology or technique. For example, many people inside and outside of government are very enthusiastic about the prospect of developing a vaccine by any means necessary to make this widespread and stubborn upper respiratory illness go away. Many of these same people are indifferent to public health interventions that would reduce or eliminate problems that are comparable to COVID. Malaria, for example, kills over 400,000 people most years, which is how many COVID deaths have been reported (as of this writing), but malaria has been doing this every year more or less since ancient Sumer.

The author is Editor of QA magazine. She can be reached at llupo@gie.net.

As I contemplated a topic for this issue’s Viewpoint column, my mind continually reverted to COVID-19 and just as quickly cast it off as “No, we’re all tired of talking about — and living — COVID.”

But that is exactly the issue, we are living COVID-19. It is a part of everything we do: at home — as we discuss what we would like to do on the weekend, and what we actually can do; in public — as masks have become either mandated or second nature for most of the US; and in business — especially in business for the food industry which has had to consider employee impacts of and protections against the pandemic since before it was even declared a pandemic.

Take a look at the articles in this issue. None of them started out as having a significant focus on COVID-19; but discussing pest-related hygiene (page 18), sanitation (page 34), and trends (page 22) — particularly trends! — with expert sources inevitably circled around to discussions of pandemic precautions, impacts, and/or expectations. And it’s virtually impossible to talk about a “New Era” (page 6) of anything without including the delays caused by and lessons learned from the pandemic.

But it is exactly that — the lessons learned — by which we hope the industry will come out the other side with improved practices, processes, and even technologies. As Jennifer McEntire discusses in Produce Production (page 48), there are silver linings to COVID-19, one of which is the rise of virtual education. Not only have there been an abundance of webinars in the last few months, but nearly all industry conferences have gone virtual, with the Food Safety Summit (originally scheduled for May, then moved to October, now announced as virtual) being the latest to join the online revolution. We’re finding that we can have face-to-face interactions, “coffee talks,” and even facility audits while we remain a great deal more than “six feet apart.”

Although this technology doesn’t, of course, provide for plant-floor production of food, it is having a bearing on it — whether that be the ability of your management team to increase their education from their desks; the application of remote auditing through the use of emerging video technologies; or even the gathering of your international management group on a “Zoom” call.

And just as tired as most of us are of talking COVID, so, too, are many tired of hearing the words “new normal.” But whether you call it that or a “New Era” or simply post-COVID, 2020 has changed the world, the nation, and the food industry itself. And it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to eradicate the word COVID from our discussions anytime in the near, or near-distant, future. But we can take the positives, the silver linings, from the clouds and make 2020 mean something good for our future.

Our United Fresh food safety team had big plans for March. Listeria, recall preparedness, you name it — we had trainings lined up for every week.

Then, suddenly, everything got cancelled, and we quickly realized that this wasn’t just going to be a delay of a few weeks. We began to wonder how we’d be able to resume our educational offerings, and quickly pivoted to using virtual platforms that now expand our training portfolio.

Produce is truly a “roll up your sleeves” part of the food industry, so the hands-on workshop-style format of trainings seems to resonate with most of the participants.

If we simply did lecture-style presentations, we could easily have shifted to a series of webinars. But that’s not interactive, and anyone with any training in adult education knows that the format is not particularly effective either.

The first virtual training we conducted was perhaps the most complicated one we offer: a recall-ready workshop that includes three trainers (a food safety expert, food law attorney, and crisis communications expert) who tag team throughout a one-day training. Participants are challenged to react to an evolving situation, with each table (in the face-to-face world) acting as a recall team.

In spending many hours figuring out how to morph this into a virtual training, we found great utility in the “breakout room” function of an online service. Because of differences in time zones, and to reduce screen fatigue, we broke the course into two days. We surely spent more time prepping for this event than we would have for a live offering. But it went off without a hitch, based on the feedback we received.

We augmented our “normal” survey questions with many questions about the virtual experience, and the responses were unanimously positive. This gave us the confidence to continue our adventures in virtual produce safety education.

Another major challenge we faced was adapting our annual convention to a virtual experience. We’ve historically offered numerous produce safety educational and networking opportunities, ranging from formal presentations and panel discussions to informal “exchange” knowledge shares and food safety receptions. But we typically offered education on the expo floor to make it easy for attendees to participate,

I’ll admit that some of the more formal sessions drew only a few dozen people. The “Exchanges,” which were set for about 20 people, were often the more popular events, drawing upwards of 50 people when the discussion was focused on a produce safety topic.

So, we were amazed when shifting to a virtual convention (including the trade show, education, receptions, general sessions, etc.) drew attendance numbers that we’ve never achieved for a conventional session. Plus, there was no need for door monitors: we know exactly who attended and how long they participated in the session.

Our one-hour workshops (presentation style, with two to three speakers and 10 to 15 minutes for questions) typically drew 150-200 people per topic. The Exchanges which had been 30 minutes were transformed into one-hour online “Coffee Talks.” Our experience in using breakout rooms and polls enabled us to provide intimate conversations and increased networking for multiple small groups (10 to 15 people) concurrently discussing the same topic.

The silver lining to the abrupt halt for face-to-face education caused by the pandemic is the increased accessibility to information. People don’t have to travel to meetings. Total time out of the office, as well as expense, is reduced, particularly for attendees outside the US. Time zones also become less important.

Although junior staff may lose the opportunity to attend live trainings through these new systems, management seems to be more willing to allow them to benefit from virtual education.

The global pandemic has redefined life as we know it, and while no one would dispute the catastrophe it’s caused, when it comes to education and training within the produce industry, I’m hopeful that we’ll be more connected than ever in this virtual world.

First, let me offer my personal thanks to food manufacturing employees and management. When I hear about essential workers, the lists include doctors and nurses, distribution drivers, grocery store workers, and even UPS workers. It appears least likely that food manufacturing workers have ever received a thank you from the public. I know and understand that you have made and continue to make great sacrifices to leave your families at home and go to work. You have been essential to providing pasteurized milk, meat and poultry cuts, bread, and even fresh veggies and fruit through this difficult time. You have risked contracting a disease that is easily transmitted through the air. We have learned much more about the transmission of this disease, and steps are being taken to minimize opportunities for getting it. Yet you are still going to work, taking personal risks for the good of the many in society. My personal thanks to you for doing this — you are my heroes.

We live in complicated times. COVID-19 has affected us all. The cry for justice and equality are forefront in our minds in the things we do. Many of us are still working from home and have not seen family or taken a vacation in a long time. We hustle through shopping to minimize our time with the unknown. There’s a lot on our minds. How do we retain a single-minded focus on the primary aspect of our jobs: food safety?

I have had the time to look through documents that I’ve saved and recently came across one that helps simplify our food safety work. In 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO) published Five Keys to Safer Food Manual (https://bit.ly/31c8NGa), which still holds true 14 years later. Its concepts can help us to understand our priorities in food safety and simplify our goals. The five keys are keep clean, separate raw and cooked, cook thoroughly, keep food at safe temperatures, and use safe water and raw materials.

In much of food manufacturing, the keys can be the basis for food safety goals and objectives as well as for HACCP-based prevention programs. Let’s look at each:

1. Keep clean. As quality and food safety practitioners, we know the value of personal hygiene and of a clean facility. Keeping clean includes GMPs, pest control, sanitation, trash removal, facility design and maintenance, and many more areas. This is first and foremost in our minds every day at our work and tends to be what we talk about most when asked about food safety. Sanitation is the most important task that takes place at a food manufacturing facility — sanitation of the facility and of the food handlers.
2. Separate raw/cooked. Certainly, this is a logical step in keeping a facility clean. Raw products are known to have pathogens, and keeping raw products as well as raw-product handlers separated from products and people who have completed a food safety intervention (heat treatment, appropriate dress, etc.) is a high priority. This is why facilities are designed with a process flow from raw product to finished product. It is why many facilities have rules on who can work and travel within given locations in a facility.
3. Cook thoroughly. Food scientists known as “process authorities” have studied food and processes to assure that process minimums are effective at eliminating or reducing to acceptable levels any pathogens in the foods. In the plant, we must ensure that these minimums are met, and that each particle of the food is cooked to appropriate times and temperatures, resulting in a safe product. In today’s scientific world, this includes many non-thermal processes as well (e.g., cold plasma, high-pressure processing, electron beam pasteurization, ultraviolet light, etc.). Each of these novel processes have expected process controls that must be met to provide safe food.
4. Keep food at safe temperatures. Bacterial growth is known to occur at most environmental temperatures. Keeping foods out of the danger zone (40°-120°F, 5°-60°C) minimizes bacterial growth and prevents growth of pathogens as well as spoilage organisms. Having appropriate controls for keeping food hot or cold is vital to preventing or eliminating pathogens.
5. Use safe water and raw materials. Raw materials may be contaminated with pathogens or even chemicals. Moldy foods may allow for the formation of toxins. Assuring that raw materials — including water — are safe is a vital step in the production of safe finished goods. Use of a compromised ingredient can lead to an unsafe finished product. Water can be used as an ingredient, as ice to chill foods, and in sanitation of people and the facility. Being unyielding on the topic of water safety improves your odds of producing a safe finished product.

In a complicated world, these five keys can be a tool to simplify our work lives and keep our consuming public safe from food safety concerns. Keeping these five topics as objectives in our daily walk-through of the facility will simplify and focus us on the important things.