Welcome Kristine Clemens!

We would like to announce the addition of a new scientist to our Food Safety group and extend her a warm welcome. Kristine Clemens joined our team this month--coming from Silliker Food Labs where she was a laboratory manager for the past 8 years. In addition to Silliker, Kristine also worked for the Food Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin where she performed food challenge studies with organisms including Clostridium botulinum, E. coli O157:H7, Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella and Staphylococcus.

Kristine has a B.S. Bacteriology from University of Wisconsin – Madison and a M.S. Food Science from Kansas State University. She joins our Food Safety product line where she is charged with writing AOAC protocols and reports as well as food assay development. We are excited to have Kristine on board and look forward to all that she brings to our food safety products!

Food Safety Happenings at the White House

What do you think of President Obama’s recent appointment of Dr. Peggy Hamburg as the new head of the FDA? Watch President Obama’s address on this and his perspective on the problems with the safety of our food supply.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/03/14/Food-Safety/

Here are the key points President Obama made:

• Average number of outbreaks from contaminated produce are up to 350 per year from 100 a year in the early 1900s


• Laws and regulations governing food safety have not been updated since they were written in the time of Teddy Roosevelt


• The FDA is significantly under-funded and under-staffed, with currently only 7,000 out of 150,000 plants and warehouses being inspected each year (roughly 5%)


• President Obama is proposing a $1 billion investment in food safety and the updating of laws and regulations, along with Dr. Hamburg to drive more cooperation between regulatory agencies

FDA WORKSHOP MAY 6-8, 2009
JAMAICA, NEW YORK

Idaho Technology recently participated in the Detecting Foodborne Pathogens FDA workshop. Scientists from around the world attended the event which was sponsored by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, AOAC International, York College of the City University of New York, and the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation. The workshop consisted of a series of lectures in the mornings dealing with everything from PCR basics to FDA regulatory issues, and hands-on laboratory sessions in the afternoons. The laboratory sessions allowed participants to try out different high throughput methods for detecting pathogens in food, including our own R.A.P.I.D.® LT Food Security System. Thanks go out to the FDA North East Regional laboratory for hosting the event!

Win an iPod Touch!!

As Idaho Technology continues to develop our Food Safety program, our goal is to make the best system possible for food borne pathogen testing. To do this we need know what you are testing for, your protocols, and desires for future testing systems and kits. We would love to take each of you out to lunch and talk about your food testing programs, but that's an impossible endeavor.

So we have created a simple survey to hep us gather the information we need. In exchange for your generous information, you will have the opportunity to win a 16 gig iPod Touch. The survey is short, 10 questions and all questions must be answered to be qualified* for the iPod.

Take the Food Safety Survey here

We have one winner already from a survey that we offered at the recent tradeshows that we attended, United Fresh and Food Safety Summit. Everyone who filled out the survey was entered to win an iPod Touch. And the winner is.....

Congratulations to Stacy Draper, Corporate QA Manager at Sun Rich Fresh Foods who won our drawing!! We hope you enjoy your iPod.

Here is a image of the survey that was available at our booth during the tradeshows. Kudo's to our creative department for coming up with such a great idea for the survey.

*The survey will be available until September 1, 2009 and the winning entrant will be notified after September 1. All Idaho Technology employees and families are excluded from this drawing.

More Fallout from Peanut Corporation of America

Stricter Regulations coming your way in Georgia…

Sonny Perdue signed a bill into law last Friday (5/2/2009) that makes the state the first to adopt stiff new food safety requirements.

The new food safety regulations would require hundreds of food processors to alert state inspectors if internal tests show their products are tainted within 24 hours. It also gives Georgia agriculture officials the power to order the manufacturer to conduct more tests.

http://rwjf.org/publichealth/digest.jsp?id=10555

Personally, I'm just glad it's safe to eat peanut butter again!! It's great that we have solutions like the R.A.P.I.D.® LT Food Security System to keep our food safe:

http://www.idahotech.com/FoodSecurity/

THE Summit

A friend of mine recently suggested that we should start working on an iPhone application, one that would allow your phone to measure Salmonella in foods before you eat. Wouldn’t that be great?!!

While we're not there yet, I was definitely in awe at all of the food safety solutions available at the Food Safety Summit this week, held in Washington, DC. The United States capital is home to many US regulatory agencies, and the Food Safety Summit focused on protecting our food supply through preparation, response and resolution. With industry leading scientists and solutions, this show dived into real world applications that affect us all. Idaho Technology was honored to take part in displaying our part of the solution—the R.A.P.I.D.® LT Food Security System—which detects food borne pathogens in less than an hour. We also continued our EAT theme showcasing our product as Easy, Accurate, and Timely.

I’d like to give a special thanks to our lead scientist for Food Security, Kelly Winterberg Ph.D., who presented on our rapid solution for detecting E. coli O157:H7.

Now that I’m home from my tradeshow tour, I’ll start tackling other hot industry topics next week. Happy Friday!!