Editor's note: The following feature "A Meeting of the Minds", originally appeared in the July issue of PCT magazine, which is QA magazine's sister publication. The article reviews how Nisus and NPD Products have joined forces to provide a new solution for fly control in commercial facilities.

A fly in the soup, literally not figuratively, is not a good thing for commercial food operations and their customers. The risk of flies transmitting food-borne illness is of major concern as is the damage the restaurant or food-processing facility would suffer to its brand, in lost revenue and possible regulatory action from local, state or federal agencies.

Controlling flies in commercial kitchens and food-processing facilities has long been both a challenge and opportunity for pest management professionals. The challenge is preventing or eliminating aggressive flies from the facility and the opportunity is securing a long-term customer when you are able to swat flies from the account for good.

Nisus Corporation and NPD Products have teamed up to help pest professionals take advantage of the opportunities flies present by offering the TrueTech system. The system features NPD’s durable, high-performing foaming machines paired with Nisus’ product line for an effective solution to small fly infestations.

“We have been working with Michael Howe for many years handling the sales and marketing for his ProFoam Platinum foaming product and with the significant investment Michael makes in R&D we felt there could be great synergy if both companies worked together to build the TrueTech brand,” says Kevin Kirkland, CEO of Nisus Corporation.

Kirkland says Nisus was able to assist NPD with financial backing to support increased production and buying power, as well as offer expanded branding and marketing opportunities.

How will the relationship benefit pest management professionals tasked with eliminating a tough small fly infestation in a commercial kitchen? “The real benefit to PMPs is the ability to use a single piece of equipment to do a liquid spray, dry foam, wet foam and misting simply by connecting to different nozzles on the unit and using different attachments,” says Kirkland.

Kirkland adds that technicians previously could only foam around the top of the drain but with the TrueTech system they can easily apply Nibor-D foam 20 to 30 feet down the drain if needed to attack the source of the infestation.

Another feature for the PMP is that other than the compressor there are no moving parts in the units so there is far less chance of the equipment breaking down, resulting in lost service time and revenue.

Lee Barrett, division vice president, domestic/international pest control for Nisus, says technicians will be able to do more with less when it comes to the equipment they carry in their service vehicle.

“The TrueTech system gives technicians the flexibility to apply pesticides as a liquid, dry foam or wet foam from one machine and that fits nicely with today’s universal technician who is asked to service a variety of accounts in a day,” says Barrett. “It will make the technician more efficient on-site for the customer and give them the ability to treat deep down into the drain and reduce callbacks.

Technicians use the machine’s foam application tip to apply the foam directly into the drain, coating the surface areas of the drain and leaving a residual that will kill flies feeding or looking to establish harborage on the scum layer.

“This is not a Band-Aid approach to fly management but rather a proven method to eliminate flies,” says Barrett. “Combined with good sanitation protocols it gives them an effective fly control to market to customers.

“Additionally, even on accounts that can’t or won’t do the necessary santization, we are seeing PMPs getting control with this system,” Barrett said.
 

A Proven Solution.

When Jim Tomlinson, lead technician for Perfection Pest Control in Union, Ky., walked into a commercial bakery account he was taken aback by the severity of the drain and fruit fly infestations that were present.

Tomlinson says fruit flies had infested two floor drains near a large mixing machine and the combination of food debris, including generous amounts of yeast and moisture, created an attractive harborage for the flies.

The location, which serves as the main production facility for the bakery’s retail outlets, is housed in an older building that contains numerous voids and structural challenges that are conducive to pest harborage. Add to that tons of unprocessed food ingredients and abundant moisture sources, and you have a recipe for potential pest problems.

“The build-up of debris in the drains had taken place over a period of time and with the facility operating six days per week sanitation wasn’t always done in a timely fashion,” says Tomlinson. “It reinforced the importance of working with customers to help them develop and follow good sanitation protocols.”

Tomlinson made some quick knockdown applications and cleaned the drain with bioremediation foam, but he had little success getting the large fly population under control. He then remembered sitting in on a demonstration that Nisus Area Sales Manager Harry Bryan had given on the TrueTech system with Nibor-D foam and thought it was worth a try.

Within two weeks after Tomlinson applied the Nibor-D foam into the drains he saw results and a big reduction in the fly population. “We service the account every two weeks and have to stay on top of it, but the results we had using the TrueTech system were very pleasing to us as well as the customer,” he said.

Tomlinson credits the TrueTech System’s flexible application tips and ability to leave behind a foam application that sticks deep down on the drain walls as the reason he was able to gain control of the large fly populations.

“It was the first time we used the system and because of its ease-of-use and the results we achieved, we will certainly look at using it in other accounts with tough fly infestations,” Tomlinson added.

The author is a partner of B Communications, an integrated communications/marketing firm. Email him at jfenner@giemedia.com.

When conducting food safety tests, there is little flexibility in the interpretation of or response to results. In most cases, it is either there or it’s not, with limits set in the U.S. by FDA, USDA, or, in the case of pesticides, EPA. However, there are lab processes and practices that can impact these results and challenges which labs face in attaining trustworthy results. Following are 10 tips to help ensure that your lab results are truly resulting in food safety and quality for your products.
 

1. Use lab tests to ensure safety, but don’t expect testing to create safety. For this reason, processors need to design quality into their systems. “You have to build quality into a product, you can’t test it in,” said Janie Dubois, laboratory program manager for the University of Maryland/JIFSAN International Food Safety Training Laboratory (IFSTL). “This is the objective of HACCP in food. You need to look at everything, determine where you should be monitoring, then do it.”
 

2. Test early in the process. “It is extremely expensive to just verify safety at the end of production and not along the way, because at that point, it either needs to be reprocessed or put in the trash,” Dubois said. There are a lot of new tests that can be conducted quickly without a great deal of training. These include such processes as strip tests that can be conducted right on the line; thin films, that need review by an analyst, but not necessarily someone with a Bachelor’s degree in microbiology; and screening tests, which are not the end-all answer, but are inexpensive and can be passed on to the lab for review and confirmation.
 

3. Beware of mistakes. “If you make a mistake, you have a better chance of getting the result you were hoping for,” Dubois said. For example, if a lab tech makes a mistake in preparation for micro testing, it is likely that an extraction would be negative, resulting in a zero count, and showing the product to be within tolerance. On the other hand, if the culture is or becomes contaminated, a false positive could result. And those, Dubois said, are expensive mistakes.
 

4. Monitor the environment. “There’s always inherently more risk when testing finished product,” said Benjamin Pascal, chief business officer for Invisible Sentinel. By regularly testing the environment—then cleaning and/or sanitizing and retesting if needed, you can prevent issues and reduce positive finished product test results. Again, you should have a specific environmental monitoring plan, focused on the how, when, where, and frequency, and have buy-in from and a sense of ownership by all workers. You may be testing, but are you testing raw, post-kill step, finished product? Are you testing the areas of highest risk?

Additionally, “sampling will always be a challenge for every diagnostic,” he said. “How do you find that one bug?” You cannot simply test an area because that is how it always has been done; rather, he said, “There needs to be good logic behind where and how you are testing in the facility.”
 

5. Validate your matrices. When a new product is developed, how do you validate that the test results will be accurate on its matrices? Some products, such as chocolate and spices, are very difficult to test, and any new or redeveloped product needs to have the test validated to ensure it is effectively testing the product and not simply resulting in negatives (real or false) because it isn’t really working on the product. “It is important that we validate that the test truly works,” Pascal said.
 

6. Have a plan. What will you do if a test comes back positive? Pascal asked. You need to be prepared for that, he said. “If we have a positive, here is what we will do, and here is how we will ensure quality.” The plan needs to be well-defined and understood by everyone.

When determining a strategy for action to be taken should a result come back positive, Pascal said, some of the questions to ask include: Is this a high-risk food? Does the process include effective kill steps? How many? Is it sold raw? Eaten raw? “One size doesn’t fit all.” Because of this, she added, “There’s a lot that rests on the shoulders of the analysts and laboratory manager,” Dubois said. “Trust is something you earn.”
 

7. Walk the floor. “I’m a big fan of technical people walking around the plant,” Dubois said. Having a different, technical set of eyes can spot potential contamination issues that may not be noticed by those who work the area every day.
 

8. Provide training and interaction. The mission of IFSTL is to teach fit-for-purpose methods that produce results demonstrating the safety of food products. A key part of this is the interaction opportunities attained by lab analysts during the training, Dubois said. “We have seen that people feel a need for building their network of technical knowledge. People are starved for friends in the industry—someone they can bounce things off of.” Lab managers or workers in larger companies may get the opportunity to go to conferences such as those put on by AOAC, IFT, IAFP, etc., but smaller companies and those in international plants don’t always have this access.
 

9. Speak the same language. One of the greatest challenges that Dubois sees for in-house food labs today is that of multiple labs within a single company caused by its expansion or mergers. As companies get bigger, they have more labs that need to talk with one another, but they don’t always speak the same language. They may be using different equipment, test kits, etc., so even when they talk with each other about the results they attained, they may not be talking about the same thing. Thus when companies merge, or simply communicate from one facility to another, technicians need to ensure they are talking the same language.
 

10. Have a trustworthy data system. If all the above is in place, but the resulting data isn’t retained in a secure system, there could be questions on the final results.

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

America has long been known as the land of plenty, and when compared to many nations of the world, the adage rings true. “We’re used to having ample food—not running out of food, and we take for granted that our food will be safe,” said Elizabeth Brewster, Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) FutureFood 2050 managing editor. Contrast that with underdeveloped countries where a third to half the food grown spoils in the field.

Both the overabundance of food and inability to get food to the people lead to waste. “And that is where technology plays a part,” Brewster said. “A lot of food gets wasted today. To stop that, you need some sort of technology. The problem isn’t production, it’s getting it to the people in a way that’s safe and useful.”

It is just such global issues that led to IFT’s creation of FutureFood 2050. Extremists tend to dominate conversations about the evils or infallibility of modern production. “Whoever is the loudest and says the craziest thing gets the most attention,” she said. For this reason, the FutureFood 2050 project focused on finding a middle ground between the extremes and promoting discussion based on science and facts instead of on people’s emotions.

A similar initiative was developed by the International Food Information Council (IFIC) Alliance to Feed the Future, with a mission to raise awareness and improve understanding of the benefits and necessity of modern food production and technology to meet global demand. The industry has been on the defense so much, it has forgotten the positive aspects of modern food systems, said IFIC and Foundation President and CEO David Schmidt.

In the land of plenty, we like to think that everyone can go to the farmers’ market and get local food. “That’s a nice idea, but it’s not practical,” Brewster said. When you consider the amount of the world’s food that spoils in the field, is eaten or destroyed by insects, is blighted by post-harvest losses, or simply is not able to reach people, “there is an obvious need for food technology.”

In fact, 842 million people in the world (one in eight) suffer from chronic hunger, said Margaret Enis Spears, director of the Office of Markets, Partnerships and Innovation, USAid Bureau for Food Security. It is not so much a matter of productivity as it is producing nutritious food and getting it to the populations, she said. “Look at Africa, there is a big gap between what is being produced and its potential.”

To address this, the Feed the Future Initiative was developed in 2009 with a goal to have a lasting impact to reduce the number of undernourished and ensure the availability of a safe, quality food supply. A key focus is on the use of irrigation, fertilizers, and hybrid seeds that allow for higher yields—such as those that are widely accepted and used in developed countries. Feed the Future works with local and international public and private partnerships to implement and train on techniques and technologies to improve food quality and safety, particularly through enhanced processing capabilities to extend shelf life, increase nutritional value, improve post-harvest handling.
 

Sustainability.

Whether implementing technologies in underdeveloped areas or one’s own manufacturing plant, industry needs to keep sustainability in mind. “In trying to solve one problem, you can’t create another,” Spears said. If a technology or other process is environmentally detrimental, you may have short-term gain, but it won’t be able to be sustained long-term.

Consumers want manufacturers to be sustainable, but there is a lot of confusion about what sustainability means, Schmidt said. While this could be seen as a negative, it actually gives the industry an opportunity to define and explain what sustainability means and what it is doing to further it. Overall, he said, the goal of a sustainable initiative should be to produce healthful, quality food, but in ways that retain the availability for future generations. Modern food technologies fit into this because, he said, “When you talk in terms of sustainability and the benefits of sustainability, feeding more people with less land is a top benefit of technology.”

Additionally, there is a growing movement toward all-natural foods from farm to fork. However, Brewster said, “people tend to forget that not everything natural is good. E. coli is natural. Salmonella is natural. We need some processing to take care of that.”
 

Industry’s Role.

“The industry needs to get out in front of things more instead of assuming the facts will speak for themselves,” Brewster said. Too often, it seems that manufacturers think that because they know an additive, ingredient, or technology is beneficial, the consumer won’t care. But when the consumers find out, they may feel as though the manufacturer was hiding something—and in many cases, there are plenty of counter-activists talking about why the additive, ingredient, or technology is harmful instead. “People latch onto things even if it is not backed by science,” Brewster said. “And food is personal; you’re putting it in your body.”

Thus, a manufacturer should be upfront and transparent, stating risks and benefits of an additive, ingredient, or technology; then noting that there may be some drawbacks, and explaining why it feels the benefit outweighs the risk. Let people know what is going on early on, and any activist backlash will be greatly diffused. Brewster noted GMO labeling as an example. It’s a little too late to lead in this area, because GMOs are already perceived as negative, she said. But if it had been explained up front; if there had been more transparency, it’s unlikely the industry would be facing the extent of criticism it sees today.

The terms used to describe technologies also can have an impact. “We have to quit using terms like GMO,” Schmidt said. “GMO is an activist term that is scientifically misleading. It’s not even accepted by FDA.” Instead, he recommends that we use the word bioengineered, discuss food production aspects as biotechnology, and focus on individual uses rather than lumping them all together. “Technology is neutral; let’s talk about the benefits of each individual case not whether or not to use it in general.”

Manufacturers also need to be careful about backing down to pressure. “The more you agree to quit using a certain technology or certain food, the more you are putting yourself in a box—which you may regret in the long term,” Schmidt said.

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

Organic food sales are growing at a rate significantly higher than that of conventional foods—almost three times higher. Why? As a general trend, consumers who buy organic foods do so because it is healthier, tastes better, has lower calories, has no GMOs, is better for the environment, and is more humane ...

Or so they think.

Of the six attributes above, which are fact? Which are required for a product to carry the USDA Organic label? Which have been proven to be fact by scientific studies?

Do you know?

The “health halo effect” of a product that is labeled as organic causes consumers to overrate the positive aspects of a food based on what they perceive the label to mean. According to USDA, which governs the use of the National Organic Program (NOP) label, it simply means that the food has been produced through approved methods “that integrate cultural, biological, and mechanical practices that foster cycling of resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity.” However, to consumers, this label, along with other wording such as “natural” and “local,” has come to mean a great deal more. (See Consumer Perception of “Organic,” below, on the right.)

This is illustrated by a study conducted by Cornell University Food and Brand researchers. For the study, 115 people, recruited from a New York shopping mall, were asked to compare pairs of food products (yogurt, cookies, potato chips) of which one of each was labeled as “organic” or “regular.”

The results: Although, in reality, each set of products was the same, participants estimated the organically labeled yogurt and cookie to have significantly fewer calories than their “regular” counterparts; the “organic” cookie and chips were believed to be more nutritious; and the “organic” chips and yogurt were said to be more appetizing and flavorful. On the other hand, the “regular” cookie was thought to taste better than the identical “organic” cookie. Additionally participants were willing to pay almost 25% more for the organic-labeled product.

The foods were exactly the same, the “organic” label greatly influenced participants’ perceptions as generally having more positive attributes. In actuality, none of the benefits attributed to organic by these participants is proven as fact, and (to answer the questions posed in the introduction of this article), only one of the six attributes has any relevance to organic labeling: the USDA NOP prohibits the use of genetic engineering, or genetically modified organisms (GMOs), in organic products.

In fact, according to the Illinois Farm Bureau, “The biggest difference in [organic and non-organic] food products is price; the same product often sells for triple the conventional price just by adding an ‘organic’ sticker.” Further, it states, “When it comes to issues such as safety, nutrition, and the environment, organic crops are no better than non-organic crops. In fact, organic food products are not as safe as many consumers perceive them to be (typically having higher bacterial counts due to use of organic fertilizers such as animal manure).”

As far back as 2008, an article was printed in The Ontario Agrologist, a publication of the Ontario Institute of Agrologists, which stated, “Personal health is the primary reason why people eat organics. As faith in the safety and nutritive value of conventional food withers, sales of organic products thrive. This is a curious thing, given that most food scientists maintain that organics hold no health advantage whatsoever.” Yet, almost a decade later, this perception continues to thrive.

Why are these misperceptions so prevalent and why are consumers willing to pay more for organic foods? According to a report by the Academics Review, an association of academic professors, researchers, teachers, and credentialed authors, “Fear sells and marketers know it.”

This assertion, published in the association’s April, 2014, Organic Marketing Report, is based on reviews of published research into consumer attitudes about organic products over the last 25 years and analysis of documented organic and natural product industry practices. The association’s review of more than 100 consumer and market research reports published from 1990 to 2013 found that food safety and health were the leading factors in a consumer’s decision to purchase organic. Additionally, it reports that the organic market itself has furthered the health and safety perceptions of consumers, stating, “these perceived attributes are driven by clear and frequent claims supported by organic marketers repeated with such frequency they have become firmly held beliefs by a majority of consumers.”

Because the perception of organic carries with it such positive beliefs, the organic label has become a powerful marketing tool, a point acknowledged even by USDA. As shown in the Cornell study previously discussed, the organic label can influence consumers’ purchasing decisions through their perception that the label means the food is better tasting, lower in calories, and higher in overall value than the same conventionally produced product.

The perceptions and misunderstandings of organic have carried over to the also-growing areas of “natural” and “local” foods, neither of which has a federally regulated definition or requirements for labeling, beyond the general statement by FDA that it “has not developed a definition for use of the term natural or its derivatives. However, the Agency has not objected to the use of the term if the food does not contain added color, artificial flavors, or synthetic substances.” Additionally, studies have found that consumers often believe that buying local means they are buying natural which means they are buying organic and/or GMO free.

Organic, natural, and local foods all have a place in the food supply chain, and each provides benefits sought by some consumers, however it is critical the consumers have facts to back up these buying decision, rather than purchasing these foods based on a health halo effect. As stated by the Illinois Farm Bureau, “Consumers should certainly be able to purchase and consume which type they prefer, organic, conventional, GMO, or non GMO.... What remains important is providing accurate and fact-based information about the various forms of production.”

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

Organic Reports

• Academics Review. Organic Marketing Report
  (http://academicsreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Academics-Review_Organic-Marketing-Report1.pdf)
• Cornell University Food and Brand Lab (http://foodpsychology.cornell.edu/outreach/organic.html). 
• European Food Information Council. Organic Food and Farming: Scientific Facts and Consumer Perceptions
  (http://www.eufic.org/article/en/expid/Organic_food_and_farming_scientific_facts_and_consumer_perceptions)
• Illinois Farm Bureau. Facts about Safety and Nutrition of Organic Foods
  (http://www.ilfb.org/media/1772150/organic_safety_final.pdf)
• University of Florida/IFAS. Some Consumers Confuse ‘Local’ with ‘Organic’ Food
  (http://news.ifas.ufl.edu/2014/05/ufifas-study-some-consumers-confuse-local-with-organic-food)
• USDA Organic Market Overview
  (http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/natural-resources-environment/organic-agriculture/organic-market-overview.aspx#.U6BxsfldV1Y)