“Having Access to a Single Source of Timely Truth Is Ideal”: Food Safety and Regulatory Expert Carmella Rashed for the STELAR Project
At the STELAR project, we keep inspecting the topic of food safety in detail. After all, it’s one of the cornerstones of our project. So, for this occasion, we connected with Carmella H. Rashed, Global Director of Regulatory Affairs at Bimbo QSR.
Carmella shared her food safety and regulatory expertise, generously offering her views on the importance of keeping pace with regulatory updates for prevention, food safety trends, and on other related topics.
Read on for our conversation that touches upon other STELAR project aims.
STELAR Project in Conversation With Carmella Rashed
The Role of Data Tools in Food Safety Compliance
As the Global Director of Regulatory Affairs at Bimbo QSR, can you tell us a bit about your position and your main focus at Bimbo QSR?
In my role as Director, I work closely with the Quality, Food Safety, Product Development, and Procurement areas in mainly two streams:
- 1. Evaluating any/all regulatory-impacted activities that may pose a risk to our consumer base and brand ecosystem
- 2. Communicating on both current and future-facing regulatory issues that will/may be impactful to ways of conducting business (formulation-related impacts, line harmonisation, labelling/allergen declarations, import and export activities).
I consider the regulatory function to be cross-functional in nature with some of our other core business activities. As such, much of our focus lies in providing high-quality products, protecting our consumers, and protecting our brand reputation.
How has the lack of standardisation in data tools across different countries impacted your work in ensuring food safety compliance? Do you have an example you can share?
In my experience — and in speaking with other food safety and regulatory professionals in this arena – having access to a single source of timely truth is ideal when it comes to food safety compliance. In the past, one of the main challenges was the timing in which food safety data was relayed. The level of criticality in responding relies heavily on the WHEN in terms of time. A notable example to share is the debacle surrounding the use of ETO (ethylene oxide) on sesame seeds that made its way into the supply chains of many organisations in 2020. I remember that the initial alerts’ timing differed across a few platforms we were using at the time.
Additionally, many reports cited “unknown” as the source of origin, so it was difficult at first to know with certainty where geographically the issue originated. Any “lost time” occurrence in being informed, processing, investigating, and communicating could be the difference between having to conduct a voluntary recall or being well-positioned in efficiently conducting core food defence activities relative to our procurement, production, and distribution ecosystems.
Food safety is affected severely by regulatory issues, changes in said regulations, etc. From your experience, does studying the correlations between these factors help predict future food safety incidents?
Studying these correlations is extremely helpful! A great example of this is the area of pesticides. In the last year alone, there have been multiple new regulations that have been passed in the EU, Japan, South Korea, Mexico and other countries limiting the levels of permitted pesticides in certain raw commodities. Keeping pace with these updates in regulations can be very useful in predicting future food safety incidents — and in PREVENTION. Transparency in information is also critical at the Codex level, where most of these regulations are discussed in detail and adapted at the country-level by participating countries.
How Does Agroknow's FOODAKAI Platform Help
How did Agroknow’s FOODAKAI platform assist you and your team in creating a standardised approach to food safety, especially when dealing with diverse sets of data and regulations?
The FOODAKAI platform helps to reinforce our internal food safety culture/approaches in the following ways:
- 1. Investigate and Collaborate [Receive information/ collaborate on discoveries]
2. Confirm [presence/absence of impacts to supply chain]
3. Communicate [Internal AND external communication]
As a data-intensive company, what kind of change did you notice in your insights and results once you started using a platform with visual benchmarking tools?
The most noticeable changes were depicted by the trends in the source of origin of food safety issues coupled with the customs data reporting. When examining the RASFF (Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed) data details alongside the trending percentage AND predictive data, one becomes even more proactive in working closely with suppliers in verification activities — and in promoting the need for risk assessments and evaluations.
To wrap up, can you put our audience at ease and give us insight into the process of training your team to move from manual data analysis to more AI-oriented insights?
In general, our training approach for gaining traction for these AI-oriented insights include:
- – Establishing a core foundation for learning and understanding [learning Regulatory Fundamentals]
– Recognizing the various learning archetypes of our associates [In which ways do associates approach this type of data? Do they enjoy learning by frequent interaction with AI data generation, or is the approach solely on a need-to-know basis for a specific project?]
– Receiving constant feedback from Quality and Food Safety associates on feasibility and granularity of the data [how to download, what information is relevant, use of proper nomenclature based on region [[conformity of declaration versus ingredient specifications, etc.]]
In Conclusion
Besides our insightful conversation, you may have gotten to know Carmella and her professional approach during our STELAR project webinar organised by Agroknow. For a refresher, read the key insight on the webinar that discussed food safety benchmarking.
To get to know the STELAR project, explore our website for more!
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